This is a most welcome new translation of the 1942 classic Italian novella, which explores the loss of innocence and the pain of growing up. It focuses on 13-year old Agostino, who is on a Tuscan seaside holiday with his beautiful mother, whom he adores. When she takes up with a young man, he feels betrayed and falls in with a gang of poorer, street-wise boys. They mock his naivety, beat him up and speak disrespectfully of his mother but he keeps coming back to them. Their insulting his mother “aroused in him an unexpected, almost cruel feeling of pleasure” as if it avenged all the humiliations he felt she had inflicted on him. He begins to see his mother as a sexual being for the first time and the feelings caused by that make him increasingly confused and unhappy. “He found that he had lost his original identity without acquiring through his loss another.”
