Recommendations
Books Like The Conformist
Best books to read after The Conformist by Alberto Moravia
The Conformist is the great Italian psychological novel of fascism — Marcello Clerici's fatal desire to be normal and the catastrophic way it intersects with the demand that he participate in political violence. If the novel's analysis of how the desire for conformity creates the conditions for complicity moved you, these books share its concern with the psychology of political collaboration, its interest in what ordinary people do under extraordinary political pressure, and its conviction that fascism was not an aberration but an expression of something latent in ordinary bourgeois desire.
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If This Is a Man
by Primo Levi
Levi's memoir of Auschwitz — the essential companion for understanding what the political system that The Conformist's Marcello serves was actually doing; where Moravia analyzes the psychology of collaboration from inside the collaborator's consciousness, Levi describes the results of what that collaboration made possible from inside the camp
- 2Buy
The Reader
by Bernhard Schlink
Schlink's novel about Michael Berg's relationship with an older woman who is later revealed as a concentration camp guard — the most important German literary exploration of the psychology of complicity; where Moravia analyzes the Italian fascist's desire for conformity, Schlink analyzes the German perpetrator's desire not to know
- 3Buy
Darkness at Noon
by Arthur Koestler
Koestler's novel about an old Bolshevik's confession under Stalin — the essential parallel in the tradition of the political-psychological novel of totalitarianism; where The Conformist analyzes fascist conformity from the inside, Darkness at Noon analyzes Stalinist confession from the inside; both are organized around the question of what a person does when their political loyalty demands the betrayal of their human judgment
- 4Buy
Life and Fate
by Vasily Grossman
Grossman's massive novel about the Battle of Stalingrad and its comparison of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism — the most important twentieth-century novel about the political systems whose intersection shapes the world of The Conformist; where Moravia focuses on one individual's complicity, Grossman encompasses the full human cost of the systems that individual's complicity sustains
- 5Buy
The Painted Bird
by Jerzy Kosiński
Kosiński's novel about a child's journey through war-ravaged Eastern Europe — the most extreme parallel to The Conformist in the tradition of the novel about what human beings do to each other under conditions of extreme political violence; both are organized around the psychology of cruelty and complicity, but where Moravia focuses on a willing collaborator, Kosiński focuses on a powerless victim
- 6Buy
Suite Française
by Irène Némirovsky
Némirovsky's novel about the French response to the German occupation — written while Némirovsky herself was in hiding and killed in Auschwitz before it was finished; the essential French parallel to The Conformist's Italian analysis of how ordinary people respond to fascist occupation; the comparison shows the range of available responses from active collaboration to accommodation to resistance
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The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
by Giorgio Bassani
Bassani's novel about a Jewish aristocratic family in Ferrara who remain in their garden while the racial laws tighten around them — the essential Italian companion to The Conformist; where Moravia's Marcello embraces fascism as a vehicle for his desire for conformity, Bassani's Finzi-Continis try to remain apart from it; both show the tragedy of the options available to Italians in the 1930s and 1940s
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Man in the Dark
by Paul Auster
Auster's novel about a retired critic who creates stories in his head during an insomniac night — the comparison in the tradition of the novel that uses consciousness as a space for examining political violence; less directly analogous but showing how the concern with political complicity and its psychological roots extends through the century
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