Cesare Pavese – författare

'Insinuating, haunting and lyrically pervasive' The New York Times Book ReviewA new translation by Tim ParksTwenty years after making his fortune in America, Eel is drawn back to the closest thing he has to a home: the Piedmontese countryside where he grew up poor and illegitimate. Wandering the valleys and vineyards with his childhood friend Nuto, Eel remembers the farm where he worked, his employer's beautiful daughters, the rituals of rural life. Yet as he discovers more about what happened there during the war, he realizes that these timeless landscapes hide terrible, savage secrets. By turns fond and evocative, seductive and troubling, The Moon and the Bonfires is a lyrical masterpiece of memory and betrayal.Translated with an Introduction by Tim Parks

'Pavese's novels are works of an extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meanings' Italo CalvinoJune, 1943. Allied aircraft are bombing Turin; fascist Italy is on its knees. Every evening, after a day's teaching in the city, Corrado returns to the safety of the hills and the care of his two doting landladies. He has no attachments, no obligations. Yet against his better judgement he is drawn to the easy warmth of a circle of anti-fascists who congregate at a nearby tavern, and confronted with a painful choice: emotional and political commitment, with all its dangers - or devastating retreat. Pavese's extraordinary semi-autobiographical novel is a lucid portrayal of missed opportunities and human weakness, set against the seductive intensity of the Italian countryside.Translated with an introduction by Tim ParksShortlisted for The Society of Authors Translation Award 2022

'An astonishing portrait of an innocent on the verge of discovering the cruelties of love... there are whispers here of the future work of Elena Ferrante' Elizabeth Strout, from the introduction'Life was a perpetual holiday in those days...'It's the height of summer in 1930s Italy and sixteen-year-old Ginia is desperate for adventure. So begins a fateful friendship with Amelia, a stylish and sophisticated artist's model who envelops her in a dazzling new world of bohemian artists and intoxicating freedom. Under the spell of her new friends, Ginia soon falls in love with Guido, an enigmatic young painter. It's the start of a desperate love affair, charged with false hope and overwhelming passion - destined to last no longer than the course of a summer.The Beautiful Summer is a gorgeous coming-of-age tale of lost innocence and first love, by one of Italy's greatest writers.'Pavese, to me, is a constant source of inspiration' Jhumpa Lahiri'One of the few essential novelists of the mid-twentieth century' Susan Sontag'[Pavese writes books of] extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meaning' Italo Calvino'For my trip to Los Angeles, I'm packing The Beautiful Summer, a slender account of love in 1930s Italy' Jessie Burton, bestselling author of The Miniaturist and The Muse

Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) was the leading Italian scholar of American literature of the generation that came to maturity under Mussolini. He was not only an acute and wide-ranging literary critic, but also a sensitive poet and novelist. In addition, he was a prodigious translator. In collaboration with Elio Vittorini, he translated and brought to the attention of the Italian public the works of many important American writers. American literature helped to give direction to Pavese's creative work and was a resource for his personal literary campaign against Fascism.Pavese was a non-academic critic, though far less anti - academic than D. H. Lawrence. His first purpose was to use American literature to subvert Italian literature, but beyond that there were a number of issues on which he disagreed with standard American criticism. When he does, his wild, original energy of discovery can trigger a welcome change of focus for our views of American writing.Pavese never visited or lived in America; it was for him a foreign country, although a shifting and sliding special case. He had no stake in its sectional chauvinisms. He had a vital stake in its whole literature because, as his communications to Vittorini make clear, he had a stake in the literature of the whole world. For a while, America seemed to him the probable center of that whole. This was the center where things were happening in the world of the mind, and where the future was being born and licked into shape. Paveses's writings about American literature still offer original and unsparing insights.

On June 23rd, 1950, Pavese, Italy's greatest modern writer received the coveted Strega Award for his novel Among Women Only. On August 26th, in a small hotel in his home town of Turin, he took his own life. Shortly before his death, he methodically destroyed all his private papers. His diary is all that remains and for this the contemporary reader can be grateful.Contemporary speculation attributed this tragedy to either an unhappy love aff air with the American film star Constance Dawling or his growing disillusionment with the Italian Communist Party. His Diaries, however, reveal a man whose art was his only means of repressing the specter of suicide which had haunted him since childhood: an obsession that finally overwhelmed him.As John Taylor notes, he possessed something much more precious than a political theory: a natural sensitivity to the plight and dignity of common people, be they bums, priests, grape-pickers, gas station attendants, office workers, or anonymous girls picked up on the street (though to women, the author could--as he admitted--be as misogynous as he was affectionate). Bitter and incisive, This Business of Living, is both moving and painful to read and stands with James Joyce's Letters and Andre Gide's Journals as one of the great literary testaments of the twentieth century.

On June 23rd, 1950, Pavese, Italy's greatest modern writer received the coveted Strega Award for his novel Among Women Only. On August 26th, in a small hotel in his home town of Turin, he took his own life. Shortly before his death, he methodically destroyed all his private papers. His diary is all that remains and for this the contemporary reader can be grateful.Contemporary speculation attributed this tragedy to either an unhappy love aff air with the American film star Constance Dawling or his growing disillusionment with the Italian Communist Party. His Diaries, however, reveal a man whose art was his only means of repressing the specter of suicide which had haunted him since childhood: an obsession that finally overwhelmed him.As John Taylor notes, he possessed something much more precious than a political theory: a natural sensitivity to the plight and dignity of common people, be they bums, priests, grape-pickers, gas station attendants, office workers, or anonymous girls picked up on the street (though to women, the author could--as he admitted--be as misogynous as he was affectionate). Bitter and incisive, This Business of Living, is both moving and painful to read and stands with James Joyce's Letters and Andre Gide's Journals as one of the great literary testaments of the twentieth century.

Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) was the leading Italian scholar of American literature of the generation that came to maturity under Mussolini. He was not only an acute and wide-ranging literary critic, but also a sensitive poet and novelist. In addition, he was a prodigious translator. In collaboration with Elio Vittorini, he translated and brought to the attention of the Italian public the works of many important American writers. American literature helped to give direction to Pavese's creative work and was a resource for his personal literary campaign against Fascism.Pavese was a non-academic critic, though far less anti - academic than D. H. Lawrence. His first purpose was to use American literature to subvert Italian literature, but beyond that there were a number of issues on which he disagreed with standard American criticism. When he does, his wild, original energy of discovery can trigger a welcome change of focus for our views of American writing.Pavese never visited or lived in America; it was for him a foreign country, although a shifting and sliding special case. He had no stake in its sectional chauvinisms. He had a vital stake in its whole literature because, as his communications to Vittorini make clear, he had a stake in the literature of the whole world. For a while, America seemed to him the probable center of that whole. This was the center where things were happening in the world of the mind, and where the future was being born and licked into shape. Paveses's writings about American literature still offer original and unsparing insights.

The Craft of Living is a collection of journals written by Italian intellectual Cesare Pavese between 1935, when the Fascist regime exiled him to Calabria, and 1950, the year he committed suicide. This is the first English publication of these journals in their entirety.Cesare Pavese was a multifaceted intellectual and Italian author who was inspired both by the classical tradition and the literary avant-garde. In his youth, he discovered and translated masterpieces of American literature such as H. Melville's Moby Dick (1932). As a novelist, he experimented with many different styles. As an editor, he contributed to the establishment and the rise of the Einaudi publishing house, one of the greatest Italian and European publishers of the period. Introduced and edited by Italian studies scholar Iuri Moscardi and translated by Julian Sachs, The Craft of Living reconstructs the genesis of Pavese's work and its editorial history through the richness of his journals. The book also contains three appendices by Pavese that have never been translated before.In his journals, Pavese recorded personal and intellectual data, demonstrating his attempt to perfect the craft of living. This book witnesses the development of his writing style and his relationship to literature which was, to him, a humanist examination of the deep connection between life and words.