BOOKS OF THE TIMES

By Herbert Mitgang EROTIC TALES. By Alberto Moravia. Translated from the Italian by Tim Parks. 184 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $15.95. MEN AND NOT MEN. By Elio Vittorini. Translated from the Italian by Sarah Henry. 197 pages. The Marlboro Press, Marlboro, Vt. $16.95. Published: December 30, 1985  http://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/30/books/books-of-the-times-257817.html

LIKE the daring Italian directors of the neorealistic films of the late 1940's and early 1950's who opened the aperture of freedom after the darkness of the Fascist era, Alberto Moravia emerged from the postwar years a liberated writer. While not as active politically in World War II Italy as such novelists as Carlo Levi, Giorgio Bassani, Italo Calvino or Elio Vittorini (or Ignazio Silone, who was in Swiss exile), Moravia and his wife, Elsa Morante, were also on the run toward the end of the war because of his anti-Fascist polemics. In his novels, Moravia's breakout from the strictures of the past took a different turn: rebellion against middle-class convention and sexual puritanism.[   ] Moravia takes his characters, and himself, very seriously. In ''The Thing,'' he balances lesbian love and animal love explicitly. His women seduce each other with an assist from the readings of Baudelaire's ''Flowers of Evil,'' once ruled obscene by a French court. ''As you see,'' says a modern seductress, ''the first verse champions lesbian love, so delicate and affectionate compared with the brutality and coarseness of heterosexual love.'' In another tale, ''To the Unknown God,'' a nurse arouses her hospitalized patients; one man succumbs after being fondled. In ''The Woman With the Black Cloak,'' a widower and widow exchange X-rated dreams on Capri. In ''The Devil Can't Save the World,'' Moravia is at his most imaginative, somehow managing to combine an Italian scientist obsessed with a Lolita-like student plus Einstein, Goya's ''Naked Maja'' and the Devil. Priapic worship has been around the Mediterranean region for several thousand years, and Moravia, with all his literary and artistic allusions and pretensions, remains true to that Greco-Roman tradition in many of these flaming ''Erotic Tales.''