The Moon and the Bonfires - Cesare Pavese

 The Moon and the Bonfires was Pavese's last novel.  It was published in 1950; he committed suicide in August that year.   He was forty-one.   Some say he was the most influential Italian novelist of his time, which makes it odd that this translation by Tim Parks didn't join the Penguin Classics until 2021.  I bought The Penguin Classics Book this time last year and Pavese isn't even mentioned in the index.

Anyway, this slim volume - a very short novel, I would suggest, rather than a novella - is about 'Eel', a bastard boy given as cheap labour to a fatrmer up in the Piedmont hills.  He works the farm, is given basic skills and an element of freedom.  He observes the farmer's three daughters, he makes friends with other farm workers and with Nuto, a part-time amateur band leader and son of the local carpenter.

After his spell of military service Eel travels to America where he makes enough money to return to his roots after the war, twenty years since leaving.   While it is probably not technically his home, the village outside Canelli is the only home he has ever known, the place he has dreamed about during his time in America.

But he returns to find that everything in the village has changed.  The farms have all changed ownership and almost all the people he knew as a boy have either left or died.   Only Nuto remains, married with children, but still the same philosophical mentor for Eel.   Twenty years ago Nuto taught Eel about life and the possibilities of change.  Twenty years on, Nuto, who hasn't changed at all, guides forty year-old Eel around their old haunts and explains, piecemeal, what happened in his absence.   Mainly what happened was the war.  Was Nuto a partisan?  It is never fully explained.  He certainly had links with the partisans hiding in the hills.  Eel himself becomes a mentor to a lame farm boy called Cinto.  It all ends with two bonfires, one in 1949, one towards the end of the war when the partisans were avenging old scores.

The style is discursive, skipping from Eel's memories to Nuto's updates.  For all his links to this rich soil Eel remains the outsider, the observer - except perhaps when it comes to Cinto.  His recollections of the women on the farm where he was raised remain detached, oddly impersonal; such women were never for him.  He has known women but it is doubtful he has ever known love.  Pavese wrote the book in less than three months yet it is incredibly deep and immersive.   I loved it.   I'm pleased to see that Penguin have also published Tim Park's translation of Pavese's semi-autobiographical novella The House on the Hill.  I'll  be having that.