Wounds from those whom you love...

It’s the fate of any emigre or exile away from their homeland to wax nostalgic and romanticise the people and places that they’ve left behind. It’s impossible to resist that temptation — time and distance slough off the hard truths and in their places are memories that obscure actual reality.

In his final novel, The Moon and the Bonfires, which was published in 1950, the Italian novelist and poet Cesare Pavese shows how easy it is to fall into this trap of romanticising the past through the story of Eel who’d grown up in a village in the Piedmont and escaped to make his fortune in America. Eel’s life in this picturesque countryside was a hard one — he’d been abandoned by his birth mother on the steps of a cathedral due to his illegitimacy and brought up by a couple who adopted him because they’d had two daughters and wanted a son.

Now, after several years away, Eel returns to see what has become of the place where his roots lay. He roams the countryside meeting his childhood friend Nuto who’d stayed behind and has eked a respectable life for himself and also wanders around with a young boy named Cinto who accompanies him as he visits the farms and hills of his childhood. Eel finds that on the surface, nothing much seems to have changed but the years of fascist rule, the Second World War, and the political turmoil of the times have affected the place at a deeper level. And it’s not just the discovery of corpses on the eroding hillsides — of fascists and anti-fascists — that give this story a dark edge. There’s only the appearance of fecundity in the soil. In truth, the smallholdings where the farmers grow their crops don’t produce much and they can only sell a part of it after the lady of the manse claims her share. The feudalistic practices still rule, making tough lives even tougher.

The lyrical title of the book is an allusion to rituals: using the moon’s phases for certain activities like washing vats and building a bonfire was thought to bring rain and hope for a good harvest. And this same lyricism threads its way through the book. In Tim Parks’ excellent translation, this is how Eel reflects on this longing for a home that springs from within:

“You need a place that’s home, if only for the excitement of leaving. Home means not being alone, knowing there’s something of you in the people, the trees, the land, something waiting for you even when you’re away.”

But this appreciation for the past and for a people and landscape that he finds comfortingly familiar is not one that Nuto shares. “The more the things and conversations I saw and heard were the same as in my time,” Eel says, “… the more I liked them.” Nuto, however, “…said I was wrong about this, I should be angry the hill folk were still living like animals, barely human, that the war hadn’t brought improvements, everything was the same as before, except for the dead.”

There’s a pervasive melancholy in The Moon and the Bonfires, born of the realisation that human cruelty knows no bounds and people and communities will go to any extent to close ranks and turn a blind eye to the injustices committed by those known to them.

Does this make The Moon and the Bonfires a downer of a read? Pavese killed himself not long after the book came out, wounded by those he loved and who did not return that love in equal measure. It’s impossible not to draw connections between the book and the author’s actions. So it’s not a happy story; but with its gorgeous prose, sharp insights into the illusions we cling to for comfort and occasional bursts of humour, it demands our consideration as the ultimate manifestation of Pavese’s writerly genius.

The author is a writer and communications professional. When she’s not reading, writing or watching cat videos, she can be found on Instagram @saudha_k where she posts about reading, writing, and cats.

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