Alberto Moravia

"Since childhood [Marcello] Clerici has struggled with conflicting urges--a compulsion to hurt others and an obsessive desire to conform. ... When he is assigned to kill a former professor, now in exile, and falls unexpectedly in love with a strange, compelling woman, his life is torn open."--Cover.

"Set in Rome, The Time of Indifference tells a deceptively simple story. Five characters are cast loose on the sea of modern life - obsessed with what they want, what they feel they are owed, the wrongs that have been done them, their loneliness. The intrigues of these family members and lovers serve to expose the hollow core of bourgeois society in the early twentieth century, and what Moravia destroys forever in this pitiless novel is the illusion...

A man is sent on a mission to assassinate his former teacher, and uses his honeymoon with his wife as a cover. He becomes entranced by his former teacher's wife, and begins to question the fascist tenets he has accepted all of his life.