70 years after his death, what does Pavese still tell us?

Men fleeing from themselves or uprooted from their community, and women with a compromised destiny, against the backdrop of an Italy marked by the restlessness of war and strong rituals. Cesare Pavese and his books, in comparison with a different reality.

Cesare Pavese On 27 August 1950, 70 years ago, at the Albergo Roma in Piazza Carlo Felice in Turin, one of the most enigmatic figures of the Italian literature of the twentieth century: Cesare Pavese. Narrator, poet, intellectual, translator of the great classics of American literature - an America all dreamed of by books and terrible in its reality (just like today) - including the famous and somewhat "free" translation of Moby Dick.

His life was marred by the remorse of not having actively participated in the Resistance and by the impossibility - or rather by the latter's obsession - to love fully, as in the case of unrequited love with Fernanda Pivano . But his books, with their scales of passions from the lower visceral to the highest motifs, and endowed with strong archetypal rituality, what do they mean for us today, perhaps restless for quite other reasons and in search of a new community after the divisions caused by pandemic?

Einaudi, who was the publisher thanks to which he became famous and with whom he shared honors and failures together with his friend Italo Calvino and his founders decimated by repression and war, reported this year some of the Pavese's works in the bookstore, with a new graphic layout illustrated by Manuele Fior and the forewords of some of his contemporary authors - including Starnone, Lagioia, Wu Ming and Scarpa.