The 3 best books by Cesare Pavese

The early disappearance of Bunting turned him into that myth made a cult author of which until Italo Calvino he drank for his prolific work. There is no more intense poetic work than that of someone who finally decides to leave the forum before their time arrives. The creative Pavese coexisted with that destructive latency, making once again understandable the coexistence of opposite poles in the same soul. More than anything because sometimes the human being is like a circle in which one end is just the continuity of its opposite end.

But beyond those torn poems, like his posthumously published verses "death will come and have your eyes" that until the last moment provide a romantic aesthetic in the face of existential darkness, Pavese also wrote some good novels that manage to combine the exquisite aesthetics of poet with a greater existential weight in characters almost always misplaced, in search of essences and chimeras among the mundane.

Thus, read a novel by Pavese It is to enjoy in various aspects the author's own contradictions. At times the scenarios acquire a lyrical sound and shortly afterwards we immerse ourselves in harsh prose, in the resentment of the narrator who feels out of place, defeated, defeated by time...

Top 3 recommended books by Cesare Pavese

The moon and the bonfires

The worst of the melancholy was for Pavese that return to the places where he was happy, with that subjective impression, much more powerful than any of the real circumstances, Pavese presented us in this story a collapse of the human being parallel to all environment of the yesterday, obligatorily changing.

Living in yesterday always entails an overly expensive visa towards perpetual nostalgia. Pavese was that lucid writer who seems to arrive early at the time of memories and old age in which there is no longer a future. However, for any reader that intense melancholy serves as an exceptional enjoyment.

The creators assure that sadness is the best stage for creation. Pavese confirms it with that return to the town of this story, where the narrator does not find anything of what was and therefore he discovers himself out of place, sentenced to describe the beauty of decadence.

Because assuming the defeat and the impossibility of a constant being, even the natural landscapes, which do remain, point towards the impossibility of reencountering the essence of the narrator. Life, travel ... symbols towards a continuous trompe l'oeil that the narrator can never finish undoing.

The moon and the bonfires

The tales

Since the great Calvin recognized that Pavese was one of his first references, it never hurts to revisit that volume with stories and thoughts of the Pavese made myth.

A sum of stories about attitudes towards life that each one has, with the mysteries that for Pavese the naturalness with which each one assumed his destiny supposed.

Recreations in those everyday details in which the common observer can barely guess a minimal description and where someone like Pavese finds a universe on which to develop each movement, each way of looking, chaining the moment to eternity.

As I read at the time, it is about scraps of life, with that magical impression that in the brilliance of Pavese's brief, much more is learned from that subjective universe that we compose with each of our minimal interventions on the stage that is the world. .

The tales

The beach

It usually happens that many of the existential writers fix their daily odysseys in their immediate surroundings, of heroic survival, à la Ulysses, in the face of the adversity that the mere fact of living and surviving can be for them.

Pavese took the scenography of his Piedmont and Turin to reveal that balance between the local and the universally human. South of Piedmont, Liguria and fascinating Genoa offer views of that eternal mare nostrum.

And on the way between one place and another we meet Doro and Clecia. He is the immutable Piedmontese, she is as variable as the journey undertaken. But both, with their particular vital tentacles, address the futility of their existence, surrendering to boredom waiting for a change of course that never comes...

The beach
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