The Moon and the Bonfire by Cesare Pavese

First published:La luna e i falo, 1950 (English translation, 1952)

Type of work: Neorealism

Time of work: The late 1940’s and, in retrospect, the period between World War I and World War II

Locale: Gaminella and neighboring villages in the Piedmont region of Italy

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, whose name and occupation are undisclosed
• Nuto, his best friend, a carpenter and a musician
• Cinto, a lame boy whom the narrator befriends
• Silvia, ,
• Irene, and
• Santina, the daughters of Sor Matteo, the landowner for whom the narrator worked as a boy

The Novel

The story of The Moon and the Bonfire unfolds on three levels of the narrator’s experience. On the first level—that of the present—the narrator has returned from America to his native village. Here he seeks out the old places and friends of his boyhood, among whom is Nuto, now married, a carpenter and local musician living quietly on his own land. It is several years after World War II, when memories of betrayal and death are still fresh and the body of a Fascist, a German soldier, or a partisan may wash out from a shallow grave in the next rain.

The narrator and Nuto renew their friendship, walking about the countryside and stopping at remembered places. Some of the townsmen and landowners are convinced that the narrator has returned from America rich enough to buy their lands, but the narrator admits to being neither rich nor desirous of buying their farms.

On one such visit he meets Cinto, Valino’s son, a lame, sickly boy who becomes fascinated with this man who has traveled to America and has come back in possession of another world. For his part, the narrator takes a liking to the boy, who reminds him of his own youth.

Here, the story reaches a second level of experience—the narrator’s past, a quiet, sometimes lonely boyhood spent in the countryside. These memories form the bulk of the novel, not only complementing and explaining the first level of action in the present but also shedding light on the narrator’s character. His earliest memories are not pleasant: He recounts his painful awareness of being illegitimate, farmed out as a young boy to work on Sor Matteo’s lands, and brought up always just outside the familial unit.

Central to his experience are his memories of Sor Matteo’s daughters and the ultimate unhappiness of their lives. Irene, the oldest, married a man she did not love and lived in a one-room flat where her husband beat her. Sylvia, more vibrant than her older sister, teased village expectations with several love affairs, but a bungled abortion at the hands of a midwife caused her to hemorrhage. She died in her bed. Santina, the youngest, sold herself to the Fascist cause, changed sides when defeat was imminent and lived with a partisan leader, then changed sides again. Captured by the partisans, she was executed. Out of love for her, the partisan leader ordered her body consigned to a bonfire so it would never be found.

The sisters’ histories span both levels of the narrative. The sisters are seen in the narrator’s youth and young manhood, and their ultimate fates are told to him by Nuto as the two stand on a hill overlooking the vineyards and the valley. They thus serve to connect the narrator’s distant past with the present and help to reinforce the perception of life as basically sad, even tragic.

The third level of the story deals also with the narrator’s past—his more recent one, in America. This range of experiences is the narrowest, the most tenuous in the book. The American experience is dreamlike in its vagueness. Places are identified by name, but they lack the hard, earthbound solidity of soil and valley and tree that forms a large part of the narrator’s feel for his native Italy. America (whose literature, significantly, Cesare Pavese had studied and written about, but whose land he had never seen) is a lonely place, a nameless desert in which the narrator had once spent a night sleeping in the cab of a truck.

The narrator’s other major experience of America was his relationship with Rosanne, a woman with whom he had lived for a time. Like him, Rosanne was rootless, pathetically holding to a vague ambition of becoming a film star. Both realized that their relationship was too fragile and that they had no future together. One morning Rosanne left him, and the narrator never saw her again.

These three levels of experience, which emerge and recede in a seemingly arbitrary pattern throughout the book, form an emotional context of loneliness, melancholy nostalgia, and hopelessness. The novel ends not with the narrator’s present situation, which would suggest at least a continuum and the possibility of a future, but with Santina’s execution, suggesting a sudden stop, a cessation of the will on the part of the narrator himself.

The Characters

Like the heroes of many classic novels, the narrator returns to his native place to find those elements in his past which will give meaning to his identity as a human being and assure him of his place in the scheme of existence. The narrator, however, receives no nourishment from his return. His sojourn in his native village gains for him no serenity. He speaks of events in a flat, unemotional tone, as if afraid to let down his guard and risk being wounded. His psychological wound—the knowledge that he is illegitimate—prevents him from giving himself completely to the joys of life, although his feel for the land and his attraction to Nuto and the boy Cinto prove his yearning to do so.

Nuto embodies that serenity and self-assuredness which the narrator finds attractive, even enviable. Nuto is a realist. He is not disillusioned by the course of life but at the same time understands the need for holding on to ideals, as when he tells the narrator that he believes in the moon, in its power as a force of nature and as a symbol. Proof of Nuto’s hardihood is that he has survived the war. Living quietly and contentedly, he helps the narrator remember the past and has no regrets.

Clever yet vulnerable, Cinto is drawn to the narrator as to a symbol of romance—the exciting life of travel and adventure in the new world. Cinto’s own boyhood, like the narrator’s, is filled with loneliness and even fear. Cinto’s father, Valino, is a violent man, frustrated and unhappy. More than once he threatens his son and ultimately burns down his house, killing the entire family except for Cinto, who has run off. Life has thus become a serious affair: violent, dangerous, and inexpressibly sad.

For the three sisters who fill a central place in the mind and heart of the narrator, life is not only sad but also too quickly gone. As the oldest of the three, Irene is the quietest and most even-tempered. Discreet in her relationships with men, she is the most self-possessed, though she is capable of jealousy when she notes the interest one of her callers has taken in her younger sister, Sylvia.

Sylvia is everything that Irene is not. Where blonde Irene is meek and ladylike, dark-haired Sylvia is outspoken and flirtatious. Where Irene plays the piano and drives with her boyfriend in a carriage, Sylvia chatters teasingly and rides with her boyfriend on the back of a motorcycle.

Santina, “the baby,” is perceived by the narrator as the most angelic; her name suggests a saintlike quality. Santina matures, however, into an earthy, passionate creature, ready to assume the political cause that most appeals to her at the time. She is, in a symbolic way, the image of Italy itself.

The three weird sisters of Greek mythology who determine the fates of men are here given flesh and blood, yet instead of controlling destiny they are themselves the victims of it. Their short, unhappy lives are a testament to the narrator’s bleak view of existence.

Critical Context

The Moon and the Bonfire was the last work Cesare Pavese wrote before committing suicide in 1950. As such, it is the most interesting of his novels for those readers seeking autobiographical clues to the writer’s state of mind. On a more critical level, however, the book is considered Pavese’s masterpiece because of his successful use of the vernacular style and the integrated use of natural symbols.

Influenced by such American writers as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner—spending much of his career in the 1930’s translating their works, as well as those of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville—Pavese experimented in his own novels with a vernacular style: plain, elliptical, idiomatic, and new to Italian literature. Paesi tuoi (1941; The Harvesters, 1961) was his first attempt with the vernacular form in a novel, but the book was obviously experimental and derivative, the style not yet fully accommodated to the action. In The Moon and the Bonfire, Pavese achieved his most successful fusion of the vernacular style with theme and meaning, creating a work which has influenced a generation of Italian novelists.

The images of moon and bonfire suffuse the novel as natural cultural symbols, commenting on action and deepening meaning without calling attention to themselves. Like the vernacular, these natural images are nonliterary and rhetorically simple, emerging organically from the action rather than being imposed upon it.

Bibliography

Fiedler, Leslie. “Introducing Cesare Pavese,” in The Kenyon Review. XVI (1954), pp. 536-553.

Heiney, Donald. “Cesare Pavese,” in Three Italian Novelists: Moravia, Pavese, Vittorini, 1968.

Sontag, Susan. “The Artist as Exemplary Sufferer,” in Against Interpretation, 1966.

Thompson, Doug. Cesare Pavese: A Study of the Major Novels and Poems, 1982.