Books: That Old Devil Sex

BITTER HONEYMOON (221 pp.)—Alberto Moravia—Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($3.50).

The books and stories of Italy's Alberto Moravia are battlegrounds, the troops men and women. No other living writer can make the battle of the sexes seem so grueling a fight to the finish. Bitter Honeymoon contains eight stories, and like most of Moravia's writing they raise an interesting question about the author: Does he really know a lot about women, or is he just terribly afraid of them? Probably the answer is: both. He knows them well enough to make male readers remember their own worst defeats, to convince women that he...