Volume 11, Number 9 · November 21, 1968
Zest for Death
By Richard Ellmann
The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese
translated with an Introduction by R.W. Flint
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 390 pp., $6.95
The neo-realism which contemporary Italy has used to disclose itself, in both novels and films, sifts the torment from aimless or blocked lives. The evident dangers of the school are inordinate detail in the external scene, automatic dumps in the inner being. Among the novelists, Cesare Pavese had, as he was not too modest to suspect, the greatest mastery. His selective disheartenments convince by their unhurried, unforced, unbombastic quality. A scene quickly takes shape, in Turin, on a hill, or by the sea, and fills up, like old photographs of the writer, with large numbers of scarcely distinguishable people. Many of them have no direct bearing upon what proves to be central; they are loose ends, and yet they help to create that rhythm of entrances and exits, of pressures and respites, which is Pavese's special tempo. The thick roiling of the scene makes one expect that some noisome mystery will be explained. Sometimes it is, more often it isn't—Pavese doesn't believe much in explanation. But a conclusion of sorts comes when, from among possibilities, a single mood is allowed to be the last. He prided himself on being neither Roman—which meant for him intellectual and 'uninvolved'—nor Neapolitan—which meant naive and sloppy. He was instead emotional and neat, Torinese by preference.
Review, 1552 words
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