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Rating: 
Summary: "I came through, even without a name."
Review: As the book opens, an unnamed narrator has returned, after twenty years, to the small Italian village in which he grew up, alone and unloved. A foundling abandoned on the cathedral steps, the narrator was brought up, for a fee, by a destitute farmer, who treated him more like a workhorse than a person with a soul. Eventually escaping as a youth to the United States, he worked his way to California, but when an accidental fortune leaves him "rich, big, fat, and free," he returns to Gaminella, where he confronts the harsh memories of his childhood and the even harsher wartime events which traumatized the town after he left. In cold, realistic, and unemotional prose, the author alternates bleak memories of the boy who was always an outsider with his observations about his later life in the U.S. and his growing awareness of the atrocities that happened in Gaminella during the war. As the speaker reconnects with the characters from his past, particularly Nuto, a friend and musician, he notes the sameness of their days, their lack of hope, and the emptiness at the heart of their lives. The speaker has always believed that "a town means not being alone, knowing that in the people, the trees, the soil, there is something of yourself, that even when you're not there it stays and waits for you," a belief which acquires enormous irony as the town's collusion in events during and after the war become clear and as bodies mysteriously surface. In language which is both understated and rigidly controlled, Pavese creates a world as bleak and cold as the moon, a world of secrets, a world in which there seem to be no dreams. His detached, almost off-handed presentation of horrors sets them in high relief and heightens their impact. Only when Pavese describes the attraction of the speaker to his employer's two daughters do we get a feeling that there's a heart beating within him, yet he remembers his "place," something which makes the daughters' fates doubly affecting and ironic for the reader. The moon and the bonfires, men and the land, nature and spirit, and ultimately life and death all combine here in a story about a small town, and, Pavese points out, "one needs a town, if only for the pleasure of leaving it." Mary Whipple
Rating:
Summary: "I came through, even without a name."
Review: As the book opens, an unnamed narrator has returned, after twenty years, to the small Italian village in which he grew up, alone and unloved. A foundling abandoned on the cathedral steps, the narrator was brought up, for a fee, by a destitute farmer, who treated him more like a workhorse than a person with a soul. Eventually escaping as a youth to the United States, he worked his way to California, but when an accidental fortune leaves him "rich, big, fat, and free," he returns to Gaminella, where he confronts the harsh memories of his childhood and the even harsher wartime events which traumatized the town after he left. In cold, realistic, and unemotional prose, the author alternates bleak memories of the boy who was always an outsider with his observations about his later life in the U.S. and his growing awareness of the atrocities that happened in Gaminella during the war. As the speaker reconnects with the characters from his past, particularly Nuto, a friend and musician, he notes the sameness of their days, their lack of hope, and the emptiness at the heart of their lives. The speaker has always believed that "a town means not being alone, knowing that in the people, the trees, the soil, there is something of yourself, that even when you're not there it stays and waits for you," a belief which acquires enormous irony as the town's collusion in events during and after the war become clear and as bodies mysteriously surface. In language which is both understated and rigidly controlled, Pavese creates a world as bleak and cold as the moon, a world of secrets, a world in which there seem to be no dreams. His detached, almost off-handed presentation of horrors sets them in high relief and heightens their impact. Only when Pavese describes the attraction of the speaker to his employer's two daughters do we get a feeling that there's a heart beating within him, yet he remembers his "place," something which makes the daughters' fates doubly affecting and ironic for the reader. The moon and the bonfires, men and the land, nature and spirit, and ultimately life and death all combine here in a story about a small town, and, Pavese points out, "one needs a town, if only for the pleasure of leaving it." Mary Whipple
Rating:
Summary: the reason why one wants to die
Review: i came across the book because i was reading some material on jean-luc godard, from which i learnt that godard read pavese's work, so i got the book from the library... i really don't know how to say anything about the book, but it certainly is one of the few books that really touched me... the protagonist's nostalgic sadness on reflecting his childhood and its innocent charm, the solitude of (impossible) love were depicted as they were natural, natural but not natural enough for him to be at ease. the style is bare but this bareness proved to be great merit, it's like hou hsiao hsien's film
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