Cesare Pavese
Paesi Tuoi

Your Villages, 1941.

A work, more precisely a novella, that sparked endless controversies due to its scandalous content. One of the first works where incest and sexual violence against women are discussed, more or less explicitly. A book in which Pavese pours all his boundless love for the Piedmontese land, depicting snippets of rural life among the hills near Turin, amidst the pungent smell of wheat, the strong taste of wine, the parched earth from the tireless daily work of the sun, the "stubble"...

In this scorching landscape, reminiscent of stories of verghian memory, the story of Berto is that of a convict released from prison who is convinced by his friend Talino to work as a machinist for his family. Here Berto begins to live a life that doesn't belong to him, grasping things unsaid, falling in love with the wrong person.

Once again Pavese drags us into the narrative using the interior monologue, proceeding with a "stuttering" exposition that does little to facilitate reading, yet is absolutely essential for understanding the protagonist's state of mind. For this reason, and for the choice to use several words taken from the Turin dialect, reading Your Villages is not the easiest. But the great magic of Pavese lies in his ability to perfectly recreate the hillside environment, so much so that the flavors, smells, and everything that can be perceived through the senses leave the pages to enter forcefully within us. In a setting where it seems impossible to escape one's responsibilities and the unbearable heat of the sun, the "contested" figure of Gisella takes on different symbolic meanings: she transitions from rape to love story to ultimately end as a sacrificial victim of a rural world that to Pavese’s eyes was still too tied to antiquity, linking back to Verga's denunciations about Sicily approximately sixty years earlier.

Landscape that transmutes. Villages that transmute: multiple times the protagonist Berto compares the hills to breasts, just as Gisella is likened to fresh fruit. Pavese continuously plays on these symbolic metaphors to show us, with all his narrative strength, his subjective interpretations of reality and the landscape in particular, never like in Your Villages a true "negative protagonist". Indeed, starting from the prison as an "unfavorable" place, Pavese seems almost unwilling to offer hope to the protagonist, transporting him to a "hostile" area, where Talino is at ease while Berto is completely bewildered.

Your Villages, the author's second novel from Piedmont, does not possess the power to convey the heartbreaking existential solitude (as was the case in "The House on the Hill"), but takes us into a rural world that Pavese had partially announced with the poetry collection "Working Tires You Out." A book that, however, has the great merit of confronting us with human "violence" in its various forms: Talino's aggression, the "familial" indifference of his father Vinverra, the consequent impotence of Berto, unknowingly trapped in an environment that appears hostile to him...

"I was looking carefully around, so that I could remember how to return and jump on the train if needed. But train, tracks, and station had all vanished. -I’m really in the countryside,- I say to myself, - here no one will find me anymore."