Agostino
About this book
Thirteen-year-old Agostino is spending the summer at a Tuscan seaside resort with his beautiful widowed mother. When she takes up with a cocksure new companion, Agostino, feeling ignored and unloved, begins hanging around with a group of local young toughs. Though repelled by their squalor and brutality, and repeatedly humiliated for his weakness and ignorance when it comes to women and sex, the boy is increasingly, masochistically drawn to the gang and its rough games. He finds himself unable to make sense of his troubled feelings. Hoping to be full of manly calm, he is instead beset by guilty curiosity and an urgent desire to sever, at any cost, the thread of troubled sensuality that binds him to his mother. Alberto Moravia’s classic, startling portrait of innocence lost was written in 1942 but rejected by Fascist censors and not published until 1944, when it became a best seller and secured the author the first literary prize of his career. Revived here in a new translation by Michael F. Moore, Agostino is poised to captivate a twenty-first-century audience.
Reader Profile
3.5/5 · 4512 readers · 128 pages · ≈ 2 h 22 m · Moderate
How long does it take to read Agostino?
About ≈ 2 h 22 m — 128 pages, assuming roughly 250 words per page at 225 words per minute.
How many pages is Agostino?
128 pages in its most-read edition.
What genre is Agostino?
It sits on the Fiction shelves.
Is Agostino in the public domain?
No — it is still under copyright.
Where does Agostino take place?
It is set in Tuscany, Italy.
Who wrote Agostino?
Alberto Moravia.