The contrast between the Italian and the German temperament is a central theme of [1934]. Since in 1934 both countries were under dictatorships that distorted the way people behaved, the contrast is seen ultimately as one between different styles of playacting: Mussolini-style fascism, which for the Italians was a matter of rather superficial conformism, and Hitler-style Nazism, which for the Germans demanded a total submergence of all individuality within the party, and which dragged the Italians down with it. Lucio and Beate are both opposed to the dictatorial regimes of their countries. Yet when Lucio is greeted by Herr Müller raising his arm vertically in the Hitler salute, he gets a sign from Beate and raises his arm horizontally in that of the Italian fascists.

The point surely is that all personal values, even those of the opponents of totalitarianism, are falsified by such dictatorships. (p. 25)

The year 1934 is the year of the falsification of everyone's values, the dissolution even of his or her personal identity, the destruction of personal relations. Lucio discovers that in his love for Beate he is forced into the role of playacting when—Beate and her husband, Herr Müller, having returned to Germany—they are replaced by Beate's twin sister, Trude, and her mother. Trude is in every way the opposite of Beate: instead of being doomed and intellectual, she is frivolous and vulgar, indeed obscene. Beate was anti-Nazi, just as Lucio is antifascist (despite, as we have seen, his having given at a sign from her the Fascist raised-arm salute).

Beate, in their one snatched conversation, has told Lucio that she detests her husband because "his hands are stained with blood." Trude talks with religious fervor of the bliss of submerging one's identity in the party. She contrives a situation in which Lucio exposes his penis in order that, before making love to him, she may discover whether he is circumcised. It would be blasphemy against the party for her to sleep with a Jew. But after all this, she reveals to Lucio that in fact she is not Beate's twin. She is, in fact, Beate. Nor is her mother her mother. Both of them are actresses who have been playing roles in order to teach a lesson to Lucio whom, in his harassment of Beate and her husband, they take to be, like all Italians who go to resorts in order to seduce girls, a Casanova.

The reader, like Lucio, may disbelieve all this, except that at the end the story takes a tragic turn, which is perhaps evidence of the truth of one relationship—that of Beate/Trude with the fellow actress who has been playing the role of her mother. The morning after Hitler's speech Paula and Beate telephone Germany, and learn that Beate's husband is one of the victims of the Hitler purge of Roehm's followers. On hearing this, they go to a place called La Migliara and commit suicide by swallowing cyanide tablets which Beate has stolen from her husband. Thus the German lesbian couple achieve the double suicide which is the logical conclusion of Kleist's double suicide with Henriette Vogel.

To convince the reader a story such as this, with a plot so full of seeming improbabilities, has to be a tour de force, written with great virtuosity—and Moravia succeeds triumphantly in this (he is also beautifully supported by his translator, William Weaver). The reader has to be kept not just looking forward while following a story which, like the one of Kleist that Lucio is translating, seems always to be thrusting him on, but also looking back so that every new and unexpected turn of events elucidates what has happened before. For instance, when Trude explains that she is really Beate and has no twin sister, the reader has mentally to reinterpret Beate's behavior from the moment when Lucio first sees her on the ship going to Anacapri. When he does so, he finds that everything Beate has done, which perhaps he took at face value, is indeed elucidated by the revelation that she has, in the opening scenes of the novel, been acting a role. The difficulty produced by the narrator, of course, is that the reader does not know what to believe. And this is the truth of the book: that within the external situation of the Italian fascist-German Nazi relationship it is impossible to accept as authentic virtually anything people do.

This is underlined by a curious episode—the relationship between Lucio and a character extraneous to the rest of the action, a Russian refugee, a woman of middle age, who sleeps around with waiters, sailors, everyone who will have her. Lucio goes to her with the intention of working off some of his repressed sexual energy reserved for Beate. In fact, at the last moment (a very depraved one) Sonia rejects him, saying that there is something about him that is cruel and that scares her. She then tells him her story: she was a Russian revolutionary who disobeyed orders to kill her lover, a double agent. The episode, which took place when she was twenty-seven, killed her, she says. She is really a living corpse. The character and her situation underline what must certainly be taken as the moral of Moravia's book, but Sonia seems superfluous to the story of Lucio and Beate/Trude. The insistence on political truth intrudes on the truth of the imagination.

Another episode that seems extraneous occurs in the penultimate chapter when Lucio visits the famous art dealer and collector Shapiro, who is Sonia's employer, in order to discuss with this wise and famous art historian the problem of his despair. The evocation of Bernard Berenson, very exactly described, is wholly enjoyable, even though it has little to do with the rest of the novel. Shapiro/Berenson's advice to Lucio illuminates Berenson's cynicism more than Lucio's despair. It is, quite simply, "Get rich." He then launches into a description of his Latvian childhood that Moravia must surely have heard from Berenson himself.

The episode of Sonia is perhaps too politically schematic, identifying Russian communism with Italian and German fascism; and that of Shapiro/Berenson is perhaps too journalistic. Nevertheless, 1934 is a wonderful invention. It starts with Kleist and Kafka and never loses its sense of them; but it is also a book in which fantasy, reality, and some deep truth about how personal relations are disfigured by the loss of freedom are all fused with Italian bravura. (p. 26)