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.

Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism - Stephen Dorril

Dorril has given us an exhaustive, not to say exhausting, slab of a book about the Brit who would have been Hitler. The research is thorough and everything Dorril discovered is here. Two problems: (1) he doesn't like Sir Oz, which is by no means a sin but doesn't augur well for a biographer; and (2) he isn't really interested in fascism per se.


Regarding the not-at-all great man, Dorril has a thesis that he was a narcissist. No, really? A politician who considers himself the greatest thing since sliced bread? An aristo who is a wee bit arrogant? Surely not! Some numpty in the quotes on the back describes Mosley as a brilliant politician. No he wasn't. He bought himself a Labour seat and never won another election. He might have been a powerful orator but he was a hopeless politician.


Not discussing pre-BUF fascism undermines Dorril's story because it is important to realise how fashionable fascism was in the 1920s. The fascists were everywhere. When he left Labour and invested a job lot of black shirts, Mosley wasn't heading out into the political wilderness, he was jumping on the bandwagon of his day.


It's a decent book but there are better ones around. The best book about Mosley is written by his son, and as for British fascism, just look at Dorril's sources. My own favourite is Hurrah for the Blackshirts because we can't remind the great British public too often about the Daily Mail and Hitler. In fairness, Lord Rothermere wasn't anything like as keen on Mosley. He regarded him as jumped-up opportunist prat, which is a pretty good assessment. Mosley isn't the story of British fascism, he's the reason it didn't succeed.