Description:
A new translation of the modern Italian classic. Doro, now married and living in Genoa, hasn't seen his old friend - an unmarried high school teacher in his thirties - for far too long. Eager to rekindle their friendship, they decide to spend the summer holidays together in a small village on the Italian Riviera. They are joined by Doro's wife, Clelia, a captivating and unpredictable woman - perhaps too much so for their marriage to endure.
What unfolds is a wry comedy of manners, filled with vignettes of life at a seaside resort. Light and airy on the surface, the novella gradually reveals its deeper insights, sneaking up on the reader with the subtlety of an ambush.
"There can be no excuse for not reading Pavese, one of the few essential novelists of the mid-twentieth century." - Susan Sontag
"Pavese's short novels constitute the densest, most dramatic and homogeneous narrative cycle of modern Italy... above all they are works of extraordinary depth, in which one never ceases to discover new levels, new meanings." - Italo Calvino
Brief description: Cesare Pavese was a novelist, poet, translator, editor, and literary critic, considered one of the most influential Italian intellectuals of the twentieth century. Born in 1908 in Santo Stefano Belbo, a small village in the Langhe region of Piedmont, he graduated from the University of Turin with a thesis on the poetry of Walt Whitman. Pavese played a key role in introducing Italian readers to major English and American writers, translating works by authors such as Joyce, Defoe, Melville, and Faulkner. As an editor at the prestigious Einaudi publishing house, Pavese oversaw the publication of novels by Natalia Ginzburg and Italo Calvino. A pioneer of literary neorealism, Pavese's work explores themes of loneliness and alienation, often featuring protagonists struggling to reconnect with a simpler rural past.Pavese battled depression throughout his life. In 1950, two months after winning the Strega Prize, Italy's most prestigious literary award, and following a failed love affair with Hollywood actress Constance Dowling, he tragically ended his life in a hotel room near Turin's railway station.