Alberto Moravia's The Conformist, perhaps his most famous novel, was in many ways a convincing portrait of fascist psychology, but I for one never understood what lesbianism had to do with it all…. Still less could I make out in Moravia's last novel, Time of Desecration, what mother-daughter incest, troilism, and sodomy had to do with terrorism in present-day Italy. Now 1934 returns us to the lesbian-fascist nexus (again with incestuous overtones), and in a subplot we hear about two sodomitical Trotskyites in pre-revolutionary Russia. Don't Christian Democrats ever get kinky?

Moravia's earlier stories were often brilliant little studies of erotic compulsion. But the erotic component has steadily drained away, until all we are now left with is the compulsion. Time of Desecration read less like a novel than a case study of sexual pathology, and one notices an almost clinical quality to Moravia's writing in 1934 as well….

[The novel] proceeds through a number of Magus-like changes of identity, leaving Lucio bewildered and the reader, unless he is a Fowles fan, increasingly irritated. The most frustrating aspect of it all is the feeling of having ended up precisely where one began. The revelations of identity beneath the disguises don't add up to revelations of character, and Lucio, for all his psychic turmoil, never seems to change.

The connection between sex and politics remains just as much a mystery as ever. Perhaps they're both just plausible motivations for an obsession that, by this point, seems to have taken on a life of its own. Moravia writes with a fetishistic intensity that, for a while at least, draws you in and carries you along. But one soon realizes that the logic of his obsession has brought him full circle, and that he's traveling in a tighter and tighter orbit around an ultimately inaccessible center. The third or so time around, one begins to weary of the trip.