Albert Camus suggested that suicide was the only philosophical question, and Alberto Moravia's new novel ["1934"] centers on a character who thinks of little else. More precisely, he wonders whether suicide is the only solution to despair or whether despair may not, as he puts it, be stabilized, accepted as "the normal condition of man … as natural as the air we breathe." "What did I mean by 'stabilize'? Somehow, imagining my life as a Nation, to institutionalize despair, recognize it officially … as a law of that same Nation."

Lucio is a young Italian hanging about Capri, peering into the melancholy eyes of Beate, a German woman he has met there. He is a student of literature, a translator of Heinrich von Kleist, the German dramatic poet whose short life ended in a double suicide, and he sees in the girl's "unhappy and stubborn look" not only a trace of moody German Romanticism but also "the sorrow of the world." Sure enough, Beate is contemplating suicide and would like to make Lucio a partner in a pact. High tragedy and silliness mix here—"It's all bad literature," Lucio thinks—and there are wry, awkward jokes…. Then Beate leaves Capri with her husband and is replaced in Lucio's pensione by her twin sister, who is also her moral opposite, full of sauciness and life. After that the plot takes a couple of fancy twists it would be unkind to reveal. (p. 11)

In 1934, the time of the novel's title and action, Mussolini had been in power for 12 years and Hitler for one. Hitler speaks on the radio and is heard by eager German holidaymakers—"He was not a concise speaker," Lucio laconically says—and word of the Night of the Long Knives reaches Capri by telephone. We are meant, I take it, to connect what Lucio calls his "psychological adventure" with the larger shifts of history. But how? Beate says her husband "horrifies" her, because "his hands are stained with blood." Does she simply mean that he is a Nazi and she is not? Or has she more specific violences in mind? Does she mean anything at all, or is she playing a gloomy game for Lucio's benefit?

There are, I think, two major implications in the novel. The first is that Fascism creates a world of salutes and gestures, a bullying theater where people either perform or are persecuted and where, therefore, many of the performers are merely hiding behind the tokens of loyalty. It will be hard to tell believers from pretenders in such a world, and zeal itself will begin to look like a parody, since, as Lucio slyly says, there are "things too true not to be feigned." At the same time, as is made clear by a story Lucio gets from a Russian exile he has run into, dictatorships need not only spies but agents provocateurs, who can tamper with reality more substantially. "An informer seeks the truth; the provocateur constructs it."

Despair is especially relevant in this context, because it is what must be concealed in forward-looking epochs. "What … could be more authentic than despair in times of terrorist dictatorship, and what, in the same times, less authentic than a healthy joy in living?" We are given a striking image of this treacherous, distorted universe very early in the book, when Lucio describes the landscape of Capri as "lying": The mountain looms, menacing, while the sea looks calm and reassuring, yet the sea is in fact the more dangerous. Which is realer, Beate's romantic sadness or her twin's hearty appetite for food and sex? Which is more German? What if both are only disguises?

The other implication is subtler and more profound. Lucio wants to "institutionalize" his despair. We may feel he is not thinking of despair at all, merely flirting with some distant relative of it, and indeed another character says to him that "true despair is not talkative." But then Lucio's doubts actually reinforce the sinister point. To glorify a despair that is less than real is frivolous as well as morbid. And either way the whole procedure plays into Hitler's hands, makes Lucio, the declared anti-Fascist, the unwitting accomplice of his enemies. He wants what they want. They too want to institutionalize despair, except that they are calling it joy.

The novel raises good questions and shows that Moravia, at 75, is far from flagging. It is perhaps a little too tricky for its own good, and Lucio is something of a stooge, as characters in Moravia's works often are, a creepy, cerebral fellow who is always several steps behind events. Moravia has craftily built ratiocinative, literary habits of mind into Lucio's character, and I suppose this disarms the critic. Or maybe not. Lucio thinks like a book. Perhaps his being in a book is not the perfect alibi. (pp. 11, 30)