Cesare Pavese kept a diary from 1935, when, aged 27, he was 'exiled' to Calabria for anti-Fascist activities, until 1950, when he committed suicide. During those years he became a successful poet and novelist, translated many celebrated American and British novels and, as chief editor at Einaudi, was responsible for publishing some of the most important writers of his time. However, readers of the diary expecting an account of life under Fascism and German occupation, or character studies of the many writers Pavese worked with, or merely details of his notoriously unhappy love life, will be disappointed. These 350 pages are almost entirely made up of attempts to pin down the relation between art and reality and to establish the nature of the author's own psychology and career, the whole punctuated with outbursts of ferocious misogyny. 'You speak of nothing but yourself and your work,' he remarks in one entry.

LRB 11 February 2010 | PDF Download