The Moon and the Bonfires

Pavese gives his narrator no name beyond Anguilla, 'the Eel,' a nickname from his hardscrabble youth as a foundling farmhand, and structures the whole novel as a return that keeps failing to deliver the reunion it promises: the farm, the family, the girl he half-loved as a boy, all exist now mostly as absence, replaced or destroyed by the years he spent away in California. The bonfires of the title, an old peasant custom of burning brush to enrich the soil, become Pavese's central figure for a violence that recurs on the landscape without ever really being resolved by it: burn enough of the old growth and something grows back, but never the same thing.

Nuto, the childhood friend Anguilla keeps returning to for information he mostly doesn't want, functions as the novel's reluctant historian, doling out what actually happened to the people Anguilla left behind in fragments delivered more from obligation than eagerness. That reluctance is the point: Pavese, writing months before his own death, builds a Piedmont where nobody who stayed through the war wants to be the one who says out loud what the war actually cost the valley. Anguilla's own status as a foundling, a child the valley took in without ever fully claiming as its own, sharpens the return further: he is asking a home that was always somewhat conditional to account for losses it would rather let a returning outsider simply not notice.

Pavese spent years translating Moby-Dick and other American fiction into Italian, work that shaped his own prose long before he sent a character to California and back, and The Moon and the Bonfires reads in places like his settling of accounts with that other literature: Anguilla's America is barely rendered at all, a blank the narrator can't animate the way he can every field and farmhouse of the valley, as if Pavese's own fluency in American writing couldn't translate into fluency in American experience. That imbalance is exactly right for the book's argument: the valley Anguilla actually knows in his body, not the country he spent years earning money in, is the only place capable of costing him anything when he finally has to reckon with it.