Volume 50, Number 17 · November 6, 2003
The Outsider's Art
By Tim Parks
The Moon and the Bonfires
by Cesare Pavese, translated from the Italian by R.W. Flint, and with an introduction by Mark Rudman
New York Review Books,154 pp., $12.95 (paper)
The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese
translated from the Italian and with an introduction by R.W. Flint
New York Review Books, 397 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930–1950
by Cesare Pavese, translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock
Copper Canyon, 372 pp., $17.00 (paper)
The Harvesters
by Cesare Pavese, translated from the Italian by A.E. Murch
London: Peter Owen, 166 pp. (out of print)
Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935–1950
by Cesare Pavese, edited by Marziano Guglielminetti and Laura Nay, with an introduction by Cesare Segre
Turin: Einaudi, 570 pp., €12.39 (paper)
An Absurd Vice: A Biography of Cesare Pavese
by Davide Lajolo, translated from the Italian and with an introduction by Mario and Mark Pietralunga
New Directions, 255 pp. (out of print)
The Italian poet and novelist Cesare Pavese, we are told in Mark Rudman's introduction to the writer's masterpiece, The Moon and the Bonfires, 'is more interested in action than introspection.' The last entry Pavese made in his diary, Il mestiere di vivere ('The Craft of Living'), would seem to support Rudman's view: 'All this [introspection] is sick. Not words. An act. I won't write any more.' But the act that was to replace the words of his diary was suicide. On August 26, 1950, at the age of forty-two, Pavese killed himself with an overdose of sleeping pills in a hotel room not far from his apartment in Turin. Much of his work can be read as an attempt to justify that decision or, rather, to establish a vision where justification is unnecessary, where suicide is destiny. The experience of reading Pavese is thus characterized by a tension between our admiration for his evocations of landscape, character, and milieu (above all in time of war), and our resistance to the self-destruction to which so much of his writing seems to point. Together with that tension comes an exciting sense of transgression: in Pavese's company anything, however negative, can be said.
Review, 4892 words
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