MÉPRIS

Alberto Moravia's exploration of the break-up of a marriage is told against the background of the film-world of post-war Rome. Why does Emilia Molteni suddenly, after two years of ideal marriage, despise her husband? How explain her unmelting frigidity? These are terrible questions which drive Riccardo, Emilia's husband, to the verge of murder, to the edge of madness, and finally to the sight of that ghost which he sees inside the red grotto of Capri at noon on a hot summer's day.

As a study of humiliation and sexual frustration, A Ghost at Noon as superb in its analysis of the guilt that corrodes every man who has failed the woman that loves him. It is a measure of Moravia's skill as a novelist that ge can draw unshocked attention to the truth about men and women and their relations in love and out of it.