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Translated from the Italian by Louise Sinclair
Anguila, the narwerator, is a successful businessman lured home
from California to the Piedmontese village where he was fostered
by peasants. After 20 years, so much has changed.
Slowly, with the power of memory, he is able to piece together
the past and relates it to what he finds left in the present.
He look at the lives and sometimes violent fates of the villagers
he has known from childhood, setting the poverty, ignorance
or indifference that binds them to these hills and valleys
against the beauty of the landscape and the rhythm of the
seasons. With stark realism and muted compassion Pavese weaves
the strands together and brings them to a stark and poignant
climax.
‘A moving, imagistic meditation on loss and ageing,
and how the simplicity and innocence childhood is eventually
crushed by the passage of time. By the end, the eerie mood
that lurks throughout has been teased into the foreground,
as Pavese unleashes a violent climax not dissimilar to the
brutal fate that Hubert Selby Jr dishes out to Tra-la-la in
Last Exit to Brooklyn.’ — * * * * * Nick
Johnstone, Uncut
‘Wonderfully written, and beautifully translated’
— Sunday Times
‘Reminds us again how good a writer Pavese was’
— Sunday Telegraph
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 English-language writers into Italian. He was imprisoned
by the government in 1935 – inspiring his novel The
Political Prisoner — and lived with the partisans
between 1943 and 1945. The bulk of his work — stories,
poems and novels — appeared between 1945 and his suicide
in 1951. |
