What is Cesare Pavese's The Moon and the Bonfires about?

Cesare Pavese wrote the novel in 1949 and Einaudi published it in April 1950. The Italian Wikipedia entry describes it as the book that closes his career as a writer of prose. It is short, a little over thirty chapters, and it carries more of the hills of Piedmont in it than many books three times its length.

The story, without spoilers

The narrator was a foundling who grew up in a village in the Langhe, the hill country of Piedmont. People called him Anguilla, the eel. As a young man he left, eventually crossed to America and made his fortune there. According to Wikipedia's English entry, he had been away some twenty-five years when, after the war, he comes back. The village is never named, but it is identified with Santo Stefano Belbo.

He finds the smells and sights he remembers and a place that has been deeply changed. His closest link is Nuto, a friend from his youth, a carpenter who plays the clarinet and who never left. He also befriends Cinto, a lonely boy in whom he seems to see something of his own childhood. Between walks, meals and conversations, the story moves back and forth between Anguilla's boyhood on the farms and what he discovers in the present.

That is as far as we will go. The last chapters are powerful and best read without warning.

What it is really about

Home and belonging. Anguilla had no parents and no name of his own, and he has spent his life looking for a place that is his. The novel asks whether that place is the village, the memory of it, or nowhere at all.

Leaving and returning. America in the book is vast and rootless; the hills are small and full of meaning. Neither is quite home. Anyone who has moved away and gone back, even for a summer, will recognise the strange double feeling.

Seasons and ritual. The title points to the rhythms of country life. The Italian Wikipedia entry reads the moon as a link between earth and sky, and the bonfires as something magical in childhood memory that later comes to stand for loss. The cycle of the seasons, and the way it outlasts the people living through it, gives the book its deep, almost ancient feel.

Memory and change. The war has passed through the hills and left its marks, but the book is less about history than about the gap between how we remember a place and what it has become.

Why read it now

It is a perfect novel for anyone who loves the Langhe and its hills and vineyards, and a sobering one for anyone who has ever romanticised going back to their roots. It is also short enough for a weekend and dense enough to stay with you for years.

Which translation

Louise Sinclair's first English version appeared in 1952, as The Moon and the Bonfire, singular. R. W. Flint's 2002 translation, The Moon and the Bonfires, won the PEN Translation Prize in 2003, and it is the one most readers will find today. Choose Flint unless you stumble on the older one second-hand.

How to read it

• Read it in a few sittings. The chapters are short and the mood builds.
• Pay attention to the switches in time. Childhood and present alternate, sometimes within a page.
• Keep Nuto in view. The friend who stayed is the quiet counterweight to the narrator who left.
• If you can, read it in the hills. A late-summer week in Piedmont and this book are a fine pairing.