The Moon and the Bonfire     by Cesare Pavese, Translated by Louise Sinclair Original title: La luna e il falò Original language: Italian Published by Peter Owen Pub. Date: January 23, 2002 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 190 pages ISBN: 0720611199 List Price: $19.95, £9.95 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide Published by Sceptre Pub. Date: 1988 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 192 pages List Price: £5.99 Not available for ordering

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Set in an impoverished corner of the Piedmontese countryside, this is the Pastorale of a writer who spent most of his adult life in industrial Turin. It describes a type of desperate rural poverty now rare in Europe but still common in the Third World: conditions that drove thousands of people to emigrate or even commit suicide.


The social commentary implicit in such a setting led early critics to see the book as a piece of political fiction, but the contemporary reader might be more struck by the sense of alienation that runs through the story. Anguilla (‘The Eel’), the narrator, is a man with no family and no friends who leaves home in the late 1920s hoping to return one day as a ‘somebody’, but finds himself always unable to participate in the intimacy of life. When he does return his home has become unrecognisable, mauled by war and social upheaval.


While the landscape and the atmosphere through which Anguilla moves are common to many European books of the late 1940s and early 1950s, the intensity of Pavese’s tone and narrative marks The Moon and the Bonfire out. Some of this intensity is found in his portrayal of women, who often seem the more complete and convincing characters in Italian fiction. The novel is haunted by the three sisters Silvia, Irene and Santina, who torment Anguilla with a beauty and grace which lies far beyond his reach.


Although the women’s lives here all end tragically, there is a sense that they have all at least lived, felt and suffered whereas Anguilla the exile, whether as a boy in Italy, away in California seeking his fortune or returned home, always stands outside, his heart permanently frozen through the emotional and material hardship he has endured.

‘Once upon a time I’d had a longing within me (one morning in a bar in San Diego I nearly went mad with it) to come out on to the main road, to push open the iron gate between the pine and the lime trees at the corner, to hear the voices and the laughter and the hens and say, «Here I am, I’ve come back,» watching their bewildered faces — the farmhands, the women, the dog, the old man and the grey eyes and the brown eyes of the girls would have recognised me from the terrace — it was a longing I’d never get rid of now.’ p80

‘Wonderfully written and beautifully translated.’ –Sunday Times