The Moon and the Bonfires

byCesare Pavese, Tim Parks (Translator)
Having made his fortune in America, Eel is magnetically drawn back to the Piedmontese countryside where he grew up poor and illegitimate. Spending the summer wandering its valleys and vineyards with his childhood friend Nuto, Eel obsessively returns in memory to the farm where he worked as an adolescent, and to his employer's beautiful daughters. The landscape and its people seem locked in timeless rituals; but as Eel discovers the secret stories of the partisans who hid out in the hills during the war, he comes to recognize that the truth is both more complicated and more disturbing.

Pavese is one of the few essential novelists of the mid-twentieth century

Susan Sontag

About Cesare Pavese

Cesare Pavese was born in 1908 in Santo Stefano Belbo, a village in the hills of Piedmont. He worked as a translator (of Melville, Joyce and Faulkner) and as an editor for the publishing house Einaudi Editore, while also publishing his own poetry and a string of successful novels, including The House on the Hill and The Moon and the Bonfires. Never actively anti-Fascist himself, he was nevertheless sent into internal exile in Calabria in 1935 for having aided other subversives. He killed himself in 1950, shortly after receiving Italy's most prestigious literary prize, the Strega.
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