Agostino – The Weird kid

Hello everyone, welcome back to my blog. The book for this week is Agostino by Alberto Moravia. I had the pleasure of reading an old and weathered copy from the public library which felt more appropriate compared to the PDFs of previous weeks. I enjoyed this this book and found it rather nostalgic, as it took me back to my time spent in Italy as a child where we would just meet random kids on the beach and play beach soccer or some other game.

The book follows Agostino, a 13 year old boy, and his summer vacation in a seaside italian village. Agostino takes great pride in going out in the patino every day with his mother until one day a strange man enters their lives and disrupts everything. The man is never described in great detail, but his presence divides Agostino’s Mother’s attention and makes Agostino extremely jealous. Eventually Agostino’s indignation comes to a head, and he storms away from his mother. At this point in the story Agostino meets a gang of boys of a notably less affluent background than himself, and he undergoes a period of self discovery. From the start, Agostino has conflicting feelings about these boys. On one hand they offer an escape from his sheltered life, and allow him to act like more of a grown-up. On the other hand they treat him quite horribly, which is a shock from the decorum he is used to in his regular social circles.

A character I found rather disturbing in this book is Saro. Saro is sort of the father figure of this gang of boys, yet he takes them out for sailboat rides and makes sexual advances towards them. Saro is discussed in a rather lighthearted way in the story, which feels strange given how horrific his behaviour is.

There were definitely aspects of the book that reminded me of Proust, although I found this one a bit easier to read. The most notable connection is the narrator’s strong attachment to their mother, although in this book it is taken up a notch and becomes even more troubling. I am curious to see whether this kind of mother-son relationship will be a common theme in these romance studies books. Another similarity I noticed was how both characters long to be treated as adults but can’t get around the fact that they are still children in the eyes of everyone around them.

Discussion Question: What did you think of Saro, and do you think his actions should have been discussed in a more serious light?