This chapter demonstrates how an analysis of 'La famiglia' throws light on crucial aspects of La casa in collina and points out new links with.

Cesare Pavese (UK: /pæˈveɪzeɪ,-zi/pav-AY-zay, -⁠zee,^[1]Italian: [ˈtʃeːzare paˈveːze, ˈtʃɛː-, -eːse]; 9 September 1908 – 27 August 1950) was an Italian poet, novelist, literary critic and translator. He is widely considered among the major authors of the 20th century in his home country.

Early life and education[edit]

Cesare Pavese was born in Santo Stefano Belbo, in the province of Cuneo. It was the village where his father was born and where the family returned for the summer holidays each year. He started infant classes in Santo Stefano Belbo, but the rest of his education was in schools in Turin.

He attended Liceo Classico Massimo d'Azeglio in Turin for his sixth form/senior high school studies.^[2] His most important teacher at the time was Augusto Monti, writer and educator, whose writing style attempted to be devoid of all rhetoric.

As a young man of letters, Pavese had a particular interest in English-language literature, graduating from the University of Turin with a thesis on the poetry of Walt Whitman. Among his mentors at the university was Leone Ginzburg, expert on Russian literature and literary critic, husband of the writer Natalia Ginzburg and father of the future historian Carlo Ginzburg. In those years, Pavese translated both classic and recent American and British authors that were then new to the Italian public.^[3]

Arrest and conviction; the war in Italy[edit]

Pavese moved in antifascist circles. In 1935 he was arrested and convicted for having letters from a political prisoner. After a few months in prison he was sent into 'confino', internal exile in Southern Italy, the commonly used sentence for those guilty of lesser political crimes. (Carlo Levi and Leone Ginzburg, also from Turin, were similarly sent into confino.) A year later Pavese returned to Turin, where he worked for the left-wing publisher Giulio Einaudi as editor and translator. Natalia Ginzburg also worked there.

Pavese was living in Rome when he was called up into the fascist army, but because of his asthma he spent six months in a military hospital. When he returned to Turin, German troops occupied the streets and most of his friends had left to fight as partisans. Namco barber cut lite cheat. Pavese fled to the hills around Serralunga di Crea, near Casale Monferrato. He took no part in the armed struggle taking place in that area. During the years in Turin, he was the mentor of the young writer and translator Fernanda Pivano, his former student at the Liceo D'Azeglio. Pavese gave her the American edition of Spoon River Anthology, which came out in Pivano's Italian translation in 1943.

After the war[edit]

After World War II Pavese joined the Italian Communist Party and worked on the party's newspaper, L'Unità. The bulk of his work was published during this time. Toward the end of his life, he would frequently visit Le Langhe, the area where he was born, where he found great solace. Depression, the failure of a brief love affair with the actress Constance Dowling, to whom his last novel and one of his last poems ('Death will come and she'll have your eyes'^[4]) were dedicated, and political disillusionment led him to his suicide by an overdose of barbiturates^[5] in 1950. That year he had won the Strega Prize for La Bella Estate, comprising three novellas: 'La tenda', written in 1940, 'Il diavolo sulle colline' (1948) and 'Tra donne sole' (1949).

Leslie Fiedler wrote of Pavese's death '..for the Italians, his death has come to have a weight like that of Hart Crane for us, a meaning that penetrates back into his own work and functions as a symbol in the literature of an age.'^[6] The circumstances of his suicide, which took place in a hotel room, mimic the last scene of Tra Donne Sole (Among Women Only), his penultimate book. His last book was 'La Luna e i Falò', published in Italy in 1950 and translated into English as The Moon and the Bonfires by Louise Sinclair in 1952.

He was an atheist.^[7]

Themes in Pavese's works[edit]

The typical protagonist in the works of Pavese is a loner, through choice or through circumstances. His relationships with men and women tend to be temporary and superficial. He may wish to have more solidarity with other people, but he often ends up betraying his ideals and friends; for example in The Prison, the political exile in a village in Southern Italy receives a note from another political confinato living nearby, who suggests a meeting. The protagonist rejects a show of solidarity and refuses to meet him. The title of the collection of the two novellas is Before the Cock Crows, a reference to Peter's betrayal of Christ before his death.

The Langhe, the area where he spent his summer holidays as a boy, had a great hold on Pavese. It is a land of rolling hills covered in vineyards. It is an area where he felt literally at home, but he recognised the harsh and brutal lives that poor peasants had making a living from the land. Bitter struggles took place between Germans and partisans in this area. The land became part of Pavese's personal mythology.

In The Moon and the Bonfires, the protagonist tells a story of drinking beer in a bar in America. A man comes in whom he recognizes as being from the valleys of Le Langhe by his way of walking and his outlook. He speaks to him in dialect suggesting a bottle of their local wine would be better than the beer. After some years in America, the protagonist returns to his home village. He explores Le Langhe with a friend who had remained in the area. He finds out that so many of his contemporaries have died in sad circumstances, some as partisans shot by the Germans, while a notable local beauty had been executed by partisans as a fascist spy.

Books[edit]

• Lavorare stanca (Hard Labor), poems 1936; expanded edition 1943.

See also: McGlazer, Ramsey (May 2017). 'The Decay of Sighing: Cesare Pavese's Lavorare stanca'. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Duke University Press. 28 (1): 94–123. doi:10.1215/10407391-3821712.

• Paesi Tuoi (Your Villages), novel 1941.
• La Spiaggia (The Beach), novel 1941.
• Feria d'agosto (August Holiday) 1946.
• Il Compagno (The Comrade), novel 1947.
• Dialoghi con Leucò (Dialogues with Leucò), philosophical dialogues between classical Greek characters, 1947.
• Il diavolo sulle colline (The Devil in the Hills), novel 1948.
• Prima che il gallo canti (Before the Cock Crows), two novellas. La casa in collina (The House on the Hill) and Il carcere (The Prison), 1949.
• La bella estate (The Fine Summer), three novellas including Tra donne sole (Women on Their Own), 1949.
• La luna e i falò (The Moon and the Bonfires), novel 1950.
• Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi (Death Will Come and Have your Eyes), poems, 1951.
• Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935–1950, The Business of Living: Diaries 1935–1950 (published in English as The Burning Brand), 1952
• Saggi Letterari, literary essays.
• Racconti, – two volumes of short stories.
• Lettere 1926–1950, – two volumes of letters.
• Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930–1950, translated by Geoffrey Brock. (Copper Canyon Press, 2002)

References[edit]

1. ^'Pavese, Cesare'. Oxford Dictionaries. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
2. ^Ward, David. 'Primo Levi's Turin.' In: Gordon, Robert S.C. (editor). The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi (Cambridge Companions to Literature). Cambridge University Press, 30 July 2007. ISBN1139827405, 9781139827409. CITED: p. 11.
3. ^Garofalo, Piero (2011). 'Pavese: Editorializing America'. In Concolino, Christopher; Nelson, Elisabetta (eds.). Cesare Pavese a San Francisco. Incontro per la celebrazione del centenario della nascita. Florence: Cesati Editore. pp. 139–148.
4. ^di Vincenzo, Ludovica (2014). 'Death will come and she'll have your eyes – The Times Stephen Spender Prize 2013 (commended)'. Stephen Spender Trust. Retrieved 7 February 2014.
5. ^'Cesare Pavese'. Italica. Archived from the original on 6 June 2011. Retrieved 20 May 2009.
6. ^Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature: First Supplement, edited by Stanley J. Kunitz, New York: The H. W. Wilson Company, 1955.
7. ^Paloni, Piermassimo, Il giornalismo di Cesare Pavese, Landoni, 1977, p. 11.

External links[edit]

• Cesare Pavese at Find a Grave
• Cesare Pavese poems translated into English by Linh Dinh. Milk Magazine
• Of Sea and Words and Toil: The Poetry of Cesare Pavese by Olivier Burckhardt, Quadrant. 48:7/8, (2004) 82–85
• Cesare Pavese and America: Life, Love, and Literature by Lawrence G. Smith

Format

Häftad (Paperback / softback)

Språk

Engelska

Antal sidor

112

Utgivningsdatum

2018-06-07

Förlag

Penguin Books Ltd

Originalspråk

Italian

Medarbetare

Strout, Elizabeth (introd.)

Dimensioner

138 x 128 x 10 mm

Vikt

94 g

Komponenter

,

ISBN

9780241983393

Passar bra ihop

1. +

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We must be grateful to the Penguin European Writers series, a precious venture in these dark times -- John Banville [A] remarkable author * Scotsman * Pavese writes with a vivid quietude that is always engaging * Guardian * Penguin's re-release of Cesare Pavese's The Beautiful Summer (as choice a pick as its title implies) is simply gorgeous * Marie Claire - Best Books to Read This Summer * There is never any doubt of Pavese's talent * The Times * Reminds one very much of the trajectory of the relationship between two young people at the heart of Andre Aciman's Call Me By Your Name * RTE Recommended Summer Reads * For my trip to Los Angeles, I'm packing Cesare Pavese's The Beautiful Summer, with an introduction by Elizabeth Strout, a slender account of love in 1930s Italy -- Jessie Burton, bestselling author of 'The Miniaturist' * Guardian Best Summer Books 2018 * Pavese, to me, is a constant source of inspiration -- Jhumpa Lahiri Cesare Pavese's cool, contemplative voice was the most important among postwar Italian writers -- W. S. DiPiero There is something about [Pavese] that is insinuating, haunting and lyrically pervasive * New York Times Book Review * [Pavese writes books of] extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meanings -- Italo Calvino One of the few essential novelists of the mid-twentieth century -- Susan Sontag An astonishing portrait of an innocent on the verge of discovering the cruelties of love.. an inimitable read.. there are whispers here of the future work of Elena Ferrante -- Elizabeth Strout, from the introduction

Cesare Pavese was born in northern Italy in 1908. Exiled by the Fascist regime to Calabria in 1935, Pavese eventually returned to Turin to work for the publishing house Einaudi. Pavese won the Strega Prize for fiction, Italy's most prestigious literary award, for The Beautiful Summer in 1950. Later the same year, after a brief affair with an American actress, he took his own life. His suicide note reads: 'I forgive everyone and ask everyone's forgiveness. O.K.? Don't gossip too much.'