•
Rating: A tormented personality. This is how one could define Cesare Pavese, but it wouldn't be enough to outline this great Italian writer. A person tormented especially psychologically, because he never managed to accept his "inability" to side with the partisans in the Second World War. This choice would inevitably weigh on Pavese's morale, leading to the tragic end: suicide. His will to take his own life was revealed by the author himself in his diary "Il mestiere di vivere," which ends with these words: "all this is disgusting. No more words. A gesture. I will write no more. I forgive everyone and ask forgiveness from everyone. Is that okay? Don't gossip too much."
His psychological state, his being "inept," the desire for solitude are all characterizing elements of the narrative work that brought Pavese his first success. "The House on the Hill" is a novella, published in 1949, in which evident autobiographical hints can be seen. A work that speaks through the protagonist's voice, Corrado, of an Italy torn by conflict. A poor country, but one that still has the will to live, that wants to rise again.
The landscape on which Pavese articulates his desire to show the difficulty of the Italian people is that of the Piedmont hills, his birthplace, which frequently recurs in his later books. A place seen as salvific, as a return to childhood moments, thus to the purity of being a child. Moments that are lost with the arrival of adulthood when man inevitably becomes aware of the things around him and shuts himself off, in a deliberate isolation. A barren landscape, dry in summer and muddy in winter, where Corrado moves. A character without illusions, perhaps too realistic. He looks at reality as everyone should, he does not deceive himself with feelings, and, probably, even knowing the truth about his son, he never had the courage to accept it as such...
A protagonist who reflects his creator, with his pessimism, his ineptitude, his will to isolate himself from the rest of the world, to "become a child again." Other figures contrast with Corrado, who is always caught up in his doubts and psychological wanderings. Fonso, Cate, Giorgi, Nando, are all individuals who act impulsively, who mobilize for the good of the country.
Pavese writes a simple yet at the same time complex work. Many say that when reading the Piedmontese author, one almost immediately loses track of the narrative, due to a plot that is hard to detect. It's not wrong, but it would be reductive to put it that way. For the writer, the plot is only a starting point on which to articulate a story that progresses mainly through ideas, the protagonist's memories. In this sense, in an innovative way, the novelist describes scenes not in chronological order, but as recalled by the protagonist.
It becomes inevitable when you live among the dead, when you do not sleep at night for fear of guerrilla warfare, when hunger and cold and misery reduce man to a being emptied of soul itself, to ask oneself the reason for all this. The reason for those dead, on those roads...
"And what do we do about the fallen? Why did they die"?
Loading comments slowly
