A review by marc129
La luna e i falò by Gian Luigi Beccaria, Cesare Pavese

reflective sad slow-paced

3.75

A book in which someone returns to his native region after 20 years, who explores what has changed, muses about how it used to be, and talks to friends from the past, that would normally be called a nostalgic book. But then you would have to call this book anti-nostalgic in a certain sense. The narrator is a businessman who grew up as an orphan in a poor village in Piedmont, Northern Italy, had a hard childhood there, fled the fascists, and built up a dubious business empire in California, and now, shortly after the Second World War, returns. He weighs up the pros and cons: what has changed? Is it better now than it used to be? Is mankind making progress or not? But he clearly cannot figure it out. 

In the meantime, we get striking descriptions of the Piedmontese landscape, of the poverty, the class differences and the superstition that apparently still prevail. And in all of that, the shadow of the past war, where fascists and partisans were after each other's lives. You will certainly not become cheerful reading this book: it is an accumulation of sorrow and gloom, it even seems very naturalistic, partly because of the rural setting. But it is written with so much searching empathy, so many refined struggles, and poetic moments, that it sticks all the harder. Also because of the sober, measured prose, this is for me one of the best Italian novels I have ever read.