The Conformist     by Alberto Moravia, Translated by Angus Davidson Original title: Il conformista Original language: Italian Published by Steerforth Press Pub. Date: 1999 Format: Paperback Dimensions: (in inches): 1.01 x 8.50 x 5.55 ISBN: 1883642655 List Price: $17.00, £10.81 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £9.73 Buy online from Amazon.com for $11.90 Published by Secker & Warburg Pub. Date: 1952 Pub. Place: UK Not available for ordering

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After a dark and troubled event in his childhood, a collision between sexuality and violence, the protagonist of The Conformist Marcello Clerici wants to have a perfectly normal adult life, one in keeping with established morality. His aim is to become like others, to be swallowed up in the mass of invisible, ordinary people, through strict observance of the rules and conduct that constitute normality. He consequently denies his homosexuality by marrying Giulia, and supports fascism for the sake of that same desire to conform with the majority, going as far as betraying his old university professor and acting as accomplice in his assassination by a fascist death squad. He still doesn’t realise that his plan to abide by conventions is no guarantee at all of morality, but rather that abandoning one’s true self is fraught with danger and dissolves personal liberty. But only when his true nature frightens him by resurfacing, stronger than his conformism, does he feel lost, and he then recognises that his presumed normality was a vain invention.


The Conformist is a variety of things: the story of a honeymoon in Paris, a crime by the state, the biography of a man, the description of an era and of a society. On reflection though it is clear that this novel is more than anything the description of a kind of character and a moral behaviour typical of our times. If last century’s hero was the rebel, the present century’s hero, according to Moravia, is the conformist, the man who wants to merge, to communicate, the man who has chosen to be the same as the rest, and not be himself. One of the great works of European cinema was based on this book, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci.

‘At this point he felt the need to express his own position in crude, sarcastic words, and said to himself coldly: «If, in fact, Fascism is a failure, if all the blackguards and incompetents and imbeciles in Rome bring the- Italian nation to ruin, then I’m nothing but a wretched murderer.» But, immediately afterwards he made a mental correction: «And yet, as things are now I couldn’t have done otherwise.»’ p269