by Cesare Pavese

Cesare Pavese was born in 1908 in the small village of Santo Stefano Belbo in the Langhe hills of lower Piedmont. He spent his childhood vacations there with the family at his parents’ farm, the rest of the year with them in Turin. When Pavese was six, his father died from a brain tumor. The loss, along with his mother’s coldness, contributed to his shyness around strangers and a preference for solitude. He developed a persistent sense of exile that found its counterpoint in the physical world when in 1935 the Fascist government exiled Pavese to Brancaleone, in Calabria, for ten months for anti-Fascist activities. Exile is a factor in his fiction; the protagonist of The Moon and the Bonfires, Eel, goes into self-imposed exile in America. Why does Pavese send Eel to the United States, a country...