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Translated from the Italian by D.D. Paige
Pavese published Among Women Only just months before
his suicide in 1950. Awarded Italy’s most prestigious
literary award, the Strega Prize, it has gone on to become
one of his most popular.
Clelia, a successful couturier, returns to Turin at the end
of the Second World War. Opening a salon of her own leads
her into a nihilistic circle of young hedonists, including
the charismatic Rosetta, whose tragic death forms the novel’s
climax. Pavese’s gritty tales of post-war Italy have
led to frequent comparisons with Michelangelo Antonioni (Blowup,
Beyond the Clouds), who successfully filmed Among
Women Only as Le Amiche in 1955.
‘Extraordinary depth where one never stops finding
new levels, new meanings.’ — Italo Calvino
‘A masterpiece by one of Italy’s truly great modern
authors’ — Babelguides
‘One of the few essential novelists of the mid-twentieth
century’ — Susan Sontag
‘Insinuating, haunting and lyrically pervasive’
— New York Times Book Review
‘Analytical and sensitive fiction by one of the greatest
Italian writers of the century’ — New Statesman
CESARE PAVESE was born in the Piedmont in 1908. Now considered
one of Italy’s most distinctive writers, he was unable
to publish his creative writing during the fascist era and
instead channelled his energies into translating the work
of some of the greatest English-language writers into Italian.
He was imprisoned by the government in 1935 — inspiring
his novel The Political Prisoner — and lived with
the partisans from 1943 to 1945. The bulk of his work —
stories, poems and novels — appeared between 1945 and
his suicide in 1950. |
