Contempt

Contempt is a brilliant and unsettling work by one of the revolutionary masters of modern European literature. All the qualities for which Alberto Moravia is justly famous -- his cool clarity of expression, his exacting attention to psychological complexity and social pretension, his still striking openness about sex -- are evident in this story of a failing marriage. Contempt, which was to inspire Jean-Luc Godard's celebrated film, is an unflinching examination of desperation and self-deception in the emotional vacuum of modern consumer society.