Contempt by Alberto Moravia

Contempt 

By Alberto Moravia 

Rating 4/5 🥰😉

Genres : Existential reality, Psychological fiction, 2022-read, Fiction

Riccardo and Emilia have lived a loving and content life as married couple for two years albeit his financial inability to provide her with what he thinks she wants/craves for the most - their own house. Their situation takes a turn for the better when Riccardo gets an opportunity to write a movie script with a famous producer Battista. Although he hates his job because of a lack of self recognition or identification it would give him, he takes it purely for the money to rent a flat with Emilia. But shortly there after he starts noticing a change in her behavior - he becomes absolutely convinced that she has stopped loving him and is indeed looking/treating him with contempt. He doesn't heed her assurances that's its not the case and falls into an endless self probing about why this has happened,  why she has stopped loving him and started despising him instead that he drives himself mad along with the reader. :-P  Because he has come to define/base the very meaning perhaps(?)for his actions/plans on the assurance of her love for him and that their love is going to last forever. Unable to find an answer to his questions, he brings them up with Emilia and it only drives them further apart..atleast her because she is forced to be absolutely honest and say all kinds of unpleasant/hateful things to him. Is Riccardo a psychological masochist that he wants to suffer so much of ill treatment and keep doing it again and again? Well anyways, it gets to the point where she wants to leave him but only stays because she has no where to go. Then Battista gives Riccardo a contract to work on a script based on Homer's Odyssey with a German director Rheunfield. Through his psychoanalysis of Ulysses and Penelope and their marriage, Rheinfueld inadvertently uncovers the truth for Emilia's estrangement from Riccardo. Before he could do anything about setting things right..and My God, he does try like hell !! ..fate intervenes and leaves him a bereaved man drifting like a lost soul..imagining and hallucinating about his wife, Emilia. :-( How is such a man going to find his root/footing and peace in this world with Emilia gone right? 

I think much of their problem in marriage is driven by misunderstanding, miscommunication and also on the two different personalities that the wife and husband have. While he is an idealist and quite a lost,selfless soul..his wife comes off as someone looking after her own interests and merely doing things that please her at the expense of men in her life..compromising when it suits her and not when it doesn't. Marriages like this are bound to shatter at some point and the one who has invested the most in it suffers obviously. But maybe I am reading too much into this whole deal..having only read the husband's version! 😒😒

I felt that the character Riccardo has at the end walked the line into insanity in his bottomless "obsession" for love and acceptance from his wife. It is so strange to read that his every thought and feeling is directed towards her and her supposed detachment from him..while she is quite content with herself and doesn't hesitate to say cruel words/mean things to him. It must be a hard thing for person to experience contempt from the one he/she loves..but I thought frankly even the narrator Riccardo has a general air of superiority complex and looks down upon things/people in his life with contempt...that its natural he found her doing to the same to him even if she is not really doing it from her perspective  perhaps?!

 Well, its an intriguing story! Its as bottomless and senseless as his obsessive love for a wife who is drifting far and far away from him !!