Why read Contempt?

Book cover of Contempt

Book description

Contempt is a brilliant and unsettling work by one of the revolutionary masters of modern European literature. All the qualities for which Alberto Moravia is justly famous—his cool clarity of expression, his exacting attention to psychological complexity and social pretension, his still-striking openness about sex—are evident in this story of…

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Genres

Literary fiction

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Contempt as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Laura Catherine Brown

Author

This book is dense and enthralling, taking the reader deep into the subconscious of the narrator, a bitter, infuriatingly passive, utterly lucid screen writer who’s witnessing the disintegration of his marriage, as his wife is slowly seduced by the film director. Or has the narrator offered her to the film director or the sake of his career? Is his career worth the cost of his creative love which is theater? The writing is gorgeous and melancholy. Not an easy read but a worthwhile one.

From Laura's 3 favorite reads in 2025.

Richard Godwin

Author

Profound, stylistic, and unique as well as insightful, this is a look at the dark side of the human unconscious and a relationship founded on the illusory projection of need, a sharp, resonant story about human identity.

From Richard's 3 favorite reads in 2025.