Forgotten Treasures: A Symposium

A book I should like to see back in print is “The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968). It comprises four of his nine novels in excellent translations by R.W. Flint: “The Beach” (a novella, 1942), “The House on the Hill,” “Among Women Only” and “The Devil in the Hills” (all 1949). The book is a good introduction to an important writer of postwar Italy. Once internationally famous, now mostly overlooked, Pavese was the peer (and friend) of Natalia Ginzburg, Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante. Their society had been destroyed by fascism, imprisonment, exile, poverty and war. Pavese was a prolific “neo-realist” for much of his short career. He gave us his native Turin and its environs during and after the war much as Leonardo Sciascia gave us his Palermo. Pavese’s work shows the influence of the English and American authors he translated (superbly, I understand): Defoe, Dickens and Melville, Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Faulkner.

The works in Flint’s selection are romantic satires. They owe much to Pirandello in their tragicomic suspense, and in their intellectual fun they foreshadow Italo Calvino. Their recurrent images of rural roads and taverns and towns, all of them lonely and haunted, of the Piedmontese hills and rivers form a suitable background for Pavese’s characters. His typical protagonist, whether male or female, is almost always an image of Pavese himself: heartbroken, voluble, stubborn and tortured by philosophical doubts. His character, heartbreak, torture and doubts are unforgettably expressed in his posthumous diaries, “The Burning Brand” (1961), translated by A.E. Murch.

Pavese ended his life in 1950 at the age of 42. 1 started reading him soon after that when I was in my 20s. I remember a different Pavese from the one I find today. His novels seem deeper to me now and much more interesting. “Among Women Only” and “The House on the Hill” are magnificent entertainments. Together with his last novel, “Moon and the Bonfire” (1950), they reward being read again at the turn of the century. *