I came home from the library with The Road and climbed into bed to start reading. He joined me with a proposition: Let me read it first or I’ll never get around to it. I hesitated.
I bought a different book today he said, and pulled Alberto Moravia’s The Voyeur out of his bag. The cover seemed interesting enough, a single eye looking through a circular peephole and the author’s name in strong block letters, so I agreed to the trade.
The novel starts innocently enough; a Professor of French Literature narrates an ordinary day in his life. He wakes up, gives us a tour of the apartment he shares with his wife, infirm father, and father’s nurse, then works, eats lunch, submits to sex, takes a walk, enjoys dinner, watches a movie, and back to the apartment. As a voyeur, he gives strong visual descriptions, and perhaps because of that he is able to break the MFA’s cardinal rule, Don’t Start Your Novel With The Character Waking Up In The Morning, and gets away with it. I was angry at first: no one should be able to do that! It’s supposed to be boring! Start us in the middle of the action! But, of course, the anger came from jealously; he succeeds where so many do not.
A retelling of the Oedipus Myth, there is competition between the father and the son, obsession with nuclear destruction, a Mallarmé poem begging to be acted out, and an electric eroticism between all characters. The voyeur intimately explores the themes, after all, as the father says, “No one has every held themselves back without regretting it later.” The main reason why I love this book is that Moravia holds nothing back.
The greatest success of the novel is that delving into the highly sexual details of the character’s lives, it’s impossible not to feel like a voyeur. The language is so strong and detailed that though reading, you can see the exhibitionists taunting you, daring you, to look away.
I read the first chapter in bed, then most of the book on public transportation, and the ending in bed again. During the juiciest bits, I wondered if the strangers on the subway and the bus were reading over my shoulder and what they must think of me, reading such explicit scenes in public. Reading over the shoulder could be a type of voyeurism, invading the private stealthily, “no one, except a voyeur, could chance to see it without being aware that he is guilty of an indiscretion.”
