Cesare Pavese

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Italian novelist, poet, and translator.
Born: September 9, 1908 — Died: August 27, 1950

blurb
"Pavese had a particular interest in English-language literature, graduating with a thesis on the poetry of Walt Whitman, and translating American and British authors that were then new to the Italian public. In 1935 he was arrested on charges of anti-fascism and served almost one year. After the war he joined the Italian Communist Party, but love frustrations and political disillusions led him to his suicide, by an overdose of barbiturates, in 1950."

in his own words
“We do not remember days, we remember moments. The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.”

books
Devil In the Hills
Among Women Only
The House in the Hills
The Beach
The Moon and the Bonfires
The Fine Summer
Death Will Come and Will Have Your Eyes
The Comrade
August Holiday
Disaffections

some of the hype
Now there can be no excuse for not reading Pavese, one of the few essential novelists of the mid—twentieth century. The new translations and the introduction by R.W. Flint are admirable.
— Susan Sontag

Pavese's nine short novels make up the most dense, dramatic and homogeneous narrative cycle of modern Italy, and also...the richest in representing social ambiances, the human comedy, the chronicle of a society. But above all they are works of an extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meanings....Each one of Pavese's novels revolves around a hidden theme, something unsaid which is the real thing he wants to say.
— Italo Calvino

A control of prose rhythms that makes [Pavese's] language at once absolutely lucid and completely incantatory.
— Leslie Fielder

[Flint's] translation is readable, stylish, and sometimes quite lyrical.
— The New Yorker

There is something about [Pavese]— and the translation does not lose it— that is insinuating, haunting and lyrically pervasive.
— The New York Times Book Review