Customer Reviews

Two Women

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In this novel Moravia gives the reader a poignant portrayal of the anguish and destruction that is brought about by war. Cesaria and her daughter Rosetta escape from Rome just as the German army is about to enter the city. For months the two women withstand hunger, cold, and humiliation as they await the Allied forces. When liberation comes, it brings unforeseen suffering. On their return to Rome Cesaria and Rosetta are brutally raped by a group of Allied Moroccan soldiers. This act of violence so destroys Rosetta's personality that she becomes anesthetized of feeling and prostitutes herself for a pair of stockings. The novel is well written and Moravia makes the point that war is as traumatic for civilians as it is for those on the front lines.

Two Women is greater than just a novel about someone's experience in a war; it is much more a novel about surviving in the world while faced with the problems of living. Moravia was a deep thinker who looked at the greater meanings of given situations, with many observations that lead to bigger questions. Reading this novel made me think of the song Imagine by John Lennon, and to see that John Lennon and Alberto Moravia were asking somewhat the same question. Except that Moravia answered this, while Lennon did not.

In its richly detailed, nuanced, and utterly moving portrayal of the experience of everyday people amid the calamity of World War II, Two Women is one of the great war novels of all time and one of the twentieth-century's greatest novels. Had Alberto Moravia gone on to win the Nobel Prize that many say he well deserved, I suspect it would have figured largely in the decision. It is certainly not some vapid "antiwar" work, but one that captures human beings and their suffering in all the poignant, painful, often dumb, and even occasionally comic detail that only the finest literature can evoke. Sure, the protagonist we meet in the novel's opening pages is a typical, rather superficial resident of Rome, but she is presented as anything but a stick figure. Is this not the brilliance of Moravia's venture here? To tell the story of war from the perspective of a person who on the one hand is not the sort to generally reflect upon the meaning of life and war, while on the other hand being clearly moved and, indeed, changed by what she has witnessed and experienced?

I agree much more with the 5-star reviewer than with Persad. Hasn't he ever heard of fallible characters? The narrator is abolutely self-centered, selfish, narrow-minded, and many other things, but she is in many ways a keen observer of the horrific events she moves through. Personally I found it interesting to read about the Liberation through the eyes of this character rather than via some omniscient narrator or distant historian. I find Moravia's unadorned prose attractive and sophisticated. A good book and two very interesting and REAL female characters.

This is the story of two women (Cesera the mother and Rosetta the daughter) who left Rome for the Italian countryside to flee WWII. The writer clearly has an anti-war agenda, but fails spectacularly to convince us of his point of view. His characters are arrogant and ungrateful of the hospitality of the strangers who take them in. Nothing is ever good enough for them. The food isn't what they were used to in Rome. The beds, the suroundings, and the country people are so beneath Cesera (in her haughty mine, anyway) that she refuses to relax or allow her daughter to do so.