This Business of Living: Diaries 1935-1950 / Edition 1

by Cesare Pavese

Overview

On June 23rd, 1950, Pavese, Italy's greatest modern writer received the coveted Strega Award for his novel Among Women Only. On August 26th, in a small hotel in his home town of Turin, he took his own life. Shortly before his death, he methodically destroyed all his private papers. His diary is all that remains and for this the contemporary reader can be grateful.

Contemporary speculation attributed this tragedy to either an unhappy love aff air with the American film star Constance Dawling or his growing disillusionment with the Italian Communist Party. His Diaries, however, reveal a man whose art was his only means of repressing the specter of suicide which had haunted him since childhood: an obsession that finally overwhelmed him.

As John Taylor notes, he possessed something much more precious than a political theory: a natural sensitivity to the plight and dignity of common people, be they bums, priests, grape-pickers, gas station attendants, office workers, or anonymous girls picked up on the street (though to women, the author could—as he admitted—be as misogynous as he was affectionate). Bitter and incisive, This Business of Living, is both moving and painful to read and stands with James Joyce's Letters and Andre Gide's Journals as one of the great literary testaments of the twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781412810197
Publisher:	Transaction Publishers
Publication date:	03/30/2009
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	366
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Cesare Pavese

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Transaction Edition, This Business of Living

Editorial Reviews

"Natalia Ginzburg once wrote that Cesare
Pavese's "conversation could be pointed and invigorating like nobody else's. The observation will strike one as all too true after reading his extraordinary diaries. Whether meditating on matters aesthetic, philosophical, or romantic, Pavese brings to bear a metaphysical yearning and a dry, compressed expressiveness to rival that of Kafka, Weil, and CioranHe aspired to an existence that would be utterly inaugural, suffused with a sense of revelation. His suffering stemmed from his inability to carry out the impossible task of raising his life and work to the level of myth. A year before his suicide, he mourned, "I wanted to go on, take it further, absorb another generation, become everlasting, like a hill." These journals are a bracing testament to that struggle."
—Tayt J. Harlin, Review of Contemporary Fiction

From the Publisher