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Translated by D.D. Paige
The Devil in the Hills is the most personal of Pavese’s
novels, an elegiac celebration of lost youth set in the landscape
of his own boyhood, the hills, vineyards and villages of Piedmont.
Three young men spend away their sun-drenched summer talking,
drinking — rarely sleeping. It is, one senses, the last
summer that they will be able to indulge such idle pleasures.
And in view of its transcience, the prolonged leisure of their
new, wealthy acquaintance Poli fascinates them. For awhile
they linger in his world, in his decaying villa, half-appalled
by his cocaine addiction, his blasphemy, his corrupt circle
of friends but nonetheless mesmerised until autumn creeps
upon the hillside, and the seasonal moment of leavetaking
arrives . . .
‘Dark and beautiful, The Devil in the Hills
reads like an American Music Club album . . . It’s a
tragic, brooding novel . . . Unmissable.’ — * *
* * * Uncut
‘In this remarkable author, the compassionate moralist
and the instinctive poet go hand in hand’ — Scotsman
‘The Devil in the Hills shows how ahead of his
time he [Pavese] was’ — The Times
‘Erotic, but extraordinarily delicate and controlled’
— Guardian
‘Makes us realise how great a loss it was to modern fiction
that Pavese died so young.’ — Sean O’Faolain
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. |
