"Que significa este vale para uma família que venha do mar, que nada saiba da Lua e das fogueiras? É indispensável tê-lo sentido com os ossos do corpo, tê-lo nos ossos como o vinho e a polenta. Então é possível conhecê-lo sem ser preciso falar dele, e quando andou dentro de nós muitos anos sem sabermos, desperta agora ao chocalho de uma carroça, ao sacudir do rabo de um boi, ao sabor de uma sopa, a uma voz que se escuta na praça, à noite." ( )

Un classico che travalica il tempo, il ritorno ai luoghi dell'infanzia e della giovinezza e i ricordi che tornano prepotenti.
Stupendo. ( )

I admit it: I have an irrational interest in post-war Italy. For some reason I find Itaalian confusion about the war much more interesting than German confusion about it, perhaps because it's pretty darn hard for anyone in Germany to pretend that the Nazis were, in any way, a benefit to the world, whereas there is an (entirely unpersuasive) argument for the Italian fascists. The German resistance existed, but not the way the Italian resistance did. German communists got to play out (a deeply mangled version of) their ideals after the war; Italian communists did not. So perhaps it's not as irrational as I thought. Perhaps I just prefer stories that aren't quite as morally obvious as "so, the Shoah... not good. Not good at all."

And that's what M&B is, really. Like Ferrante's justly popular novels, Pavese writes about a small community which has papered over the dislocations of the fascist years. Like her novels, he manages to combine very intelligent symbolism (the moon, basically, the other side of the fence where the grass etc but where there is also no there; the bonfires, the superstitions but also rootedness of the old world) and paradox with a straightforward style and garden-variety realism. So, if you like Ferrante, and haven't read this, give it a shot.

But a caveat: there are major flaws here. Our narrator, 'the eel,' has fled the fascists to the U.S.A., where he gets involved in (I think) bootleg liquor. It's all very vague, and this is no minor problem. The Eel's memories of the U.S., his relationships with people there, his description of the landscape etc., are all extremely dull (with one exception, a girlfriend, who is also fairly dull). The book can seem aimless, and I suspect it will be much better on a second read, since I now know where we're heading and why the eel's memories are being recounted.

All that said, spoiler alert here.

One interesting interpretive point: the introduction to the NYRB edition, and many reviewers here, really don't like Nuto. I think this is a mistake. Nuto is committed enough to others that he's a communist in a right-wing province (probably not the right geographical term); he's committed enough to have been a member of the resistance. Now, how do we weigh that against the fact that he let Santina be executed for espionage? The introduction here suggests more than a little that Santina was *not*, really, a spy at all, just put in the wrong circumstances and denied the guiding hand she needed--a hand that Nuto should have provided. I think this is making the interpretation far too easy. I prefer a grimmer understanding: that Santina had to be killed (resistance fighters, particularly, can't afford to have spies running around); that, ideally, she wouldn't have had to be killed; that Nuto is consumed with guilt at his role in this and tries to avoid it by lying about it; that the Eel is just as guilty for running away; that the Eel had no choice but to run away; and so on. The book presents us, I think, with a fairly clear and convincing tragic view, in which the good people (never mind the bad, they'll always be with us) are forced to do bad things. Nuto, because the resistance demanded it; the Eel, because he had to save his own life; Santina, because of the patriarchy. But Nuto stands out as someone who believes that the tragedy is human-made, rather than natural. Fascism was the sine qua non of Santina's death, Eel's exile, Nuto's crime. People did these things. They were not natural.

Which makes the book sound much more moralistic than it is. It's also an investigation of memory and so on, none of which I find very interesting. But if that's your thing, this is a better option than Sebald, for the reasons given above. ( )

A miserable book of gloom and despair. The narrator, Anguilla, tells the story on three levels 1) his village before WWII, 2) his stay of 20 years in America, 3) his return to his village. Anguilla finds almost nobody left that he knows and sees the villagers still struggling to cope with the devastation of WWII. I found nothing to like in this book; it almost seemed as if it were stream of consciousness, but because of the three very defined locales in the story, I can't really define it as such; although, I would say the book has a dreamlike quality. This was the last book the author wrote before he committed suicide and I think his troubled soul shows through in his writing. ( )

I found Cesare Pavese's "The Moon and the Bonfire" to be too slow moving and consequently not terribly interesting. Every time I picked it up, I completely forgot what the book was about until I started reading again-- which doesn't bode all that well for the memorability of the book a year or two from now.

The book is about a poor Italian who immigrated to America, then returns to his roots and reminisces about the events of his childhood.

This is an okay work, but not something that really drew me in, unfortunately. ( )