The Moon and the Bonfires

By Cesare Pavese
Translated from the Italian by R.W. Flint
Introduction by Mark Rudman

Winner of the 2003 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize

A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL

The nameless narrator of The Moon and the Bonfires, Cesare Pavese's last and greatest novel, returns to Italy from California after the Second World War. He has done well in America, but success hasn't taken the edge off his memories of childhood, when he was an orphan living at the mercy of a bitterly poor farmer. He wants to learn what happened in his native village over the long, terrible years of Fascism; perhaps, he even thinks, he will settle down. And yet as he uncovers a secret and savage history from the war—a tale of betrayal and reprisal, sex and death—he finds that the past still haunts the present. The Moon and the Bonfires is a novel of intense lyricism and tragic import, a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature that has been unavailable to American readers for close to fifty years. Here it appears in a vigorous new English version by R. W. Flint, whose earlier translations of Pavese's fiction were acclaimed by Leslie Fiedler as "absolutely lucid and completely incantatory."

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

Now there can be no excuse for not reading Pavese, one of the few essential novelists of the mid-twentieth century.
— Susan Sontag

Pavese made an attempt, heroic and successful, to encompass national and social concerns. His novels about Italy in the later stages of the Second World War formed a 'historical cycle of my own times'. . . Among the [Italian neo-realist] novelists, Cesare Pavese had, as he was not too modest to suspect, the greatest mastery.
— Richard Ellman, The New York Review of Books

Cesare Pavese's cool, contemplative voice was the most important among postwar Italian writers. He created a fresh narrative vernacular not only responsive to modern urban life but also to the traces in our time of the archaic past.
— W. S. DiPiero

Pavese's real ambition in this work did not reside simply in the creation of a successful novel: everything in the book converges in one single direction, images, and analogies bear down on one obsessive concern: human sacrifices.
— Italo Calvino

Also see:

Boredom By Alberto Moravia Translated from the Italian by Angus Davidson Introduction by William Weaver Boredom, the story of a failed artist and pampered son of a rich family who becomes dangerously attached to a young model, examines the complex relations between money, sex, and imperiled masculinity.

Contempt By Alberto Moravia Translated from the Italian by Angus Davidson Introduction by Tim Parks All the qualities for which Alberto Moravia is justly famous—his cool clarity of expression, his exacting attention to psychological complexity and social pretension, his still-striking openness about sex—are evident in this story of a failing marriage.

The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese By Cesare Pavese Translated and with an introduction by R.W. Flint Now there can be no excuse for not reading Pavese, one of the few essential novelists of the mid-twentieth century. The new translations and the introduction by R.W. Flint are admirable. —Susan Sontag

As a Man Grows Older By Italo Svevo Translated from the Italian by Beryl de Zoete Introduction by James Lasdun A brilliant study of hopeless love and hapless indecision. It is a masterwork of Italian literature, here beautifully rendered into English in Beryl de Zoete's classic translation.

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