The Moon and the Bonfires (aka. The Moon and the Bonfire) [Paperback]

As the book opens, an unnamed narrator has returned, after twenty years, to the small Italian village in which he grew up, alone and unloved. A foundling abandoned on the cathedral steps, the narrator was brought up, for a fee, by a destitute farmer, who treated him more like a workhorse than a person with a soul. Eventually escaping as a youth to the United States, he worked his way to California, but when an accidental fortune leaves him "rich, big, fat, and free," he returns to Gaminella, where he confronts the harsh memories of his childhood and the even harsher wartime events which traumatized the town after he left.

In cold, realistic, and unemotional prose, the author alternates bleak memories of the boy who was always an outsider with his observations about his later life in the U.S. and his growing awareness of the atrocities that happened in Gaminella during the war. As the speaker reconnects with the characters from his past, particularly Nuto, a friend and musician, he notes the sameness of their days, their lack of hope, and the emptiness at the heart of their lives. The speaker has always believed that "a town means not being alone, knowing that in the people, the trees, the soil, there is something of yourself, that even when you're not there it stays and waits for you," a belief which acquires enormous irony as the town's collusion in events during and after the war become clear and as bodies mysteriously surface.

In language which is both understated and rigidly controlled, Pavese creates a world as bleak and cold as the moon, a world of secrets, a world in which there seem to be no dreams. His detached, almost off-handed presentation of horrors sets them in high relief and heightens their impact. Only when Pavese describes the attraction of the speaker to his employer's two daughters do we get a feeling that there's a heart beating within him, yet he remembers his "place," something which makes the daughters' fates doubly affecting and ironic for the reader. The moon and the bonfires, men and the land, nature and spirit, and ultimately life and death all combine here in a story about a small town, and, Pavese points out, "one needs a town, if only for the pleasure of leaving it." Mary Whipple

This book was published in Italy in 1950. It's narrated by a man who returns to his village in Piemonte at age 40 shortly after the end of World War II. He'd been born there, abandoned and had grown up poor, without status and bullied by the other children. Having left at age 20 to make his fortune, traveling and working at many jobs in the United States and elsewhere but never putting down roots, he finally returns with a longing to see the village once more.

He finds one friend remaining from his days of youth, who'd opened his eyes to the world beyond the village when they were boys but who'd remained. They can still talk to each other, but are adults now and so their relationship lacks the natural ease of childhood. He also befriends a poor, ignorant boy who reminds him of his own beginning and how much he's changed. He feels a desire to help the boy break out of his constricted world, and seeks ways to communicate with him, while envying the boy's innocence and freshness, which he's lost. Each of these friendships will be linked to tragedy, revealed in the past or occurring in the present. From these, life will end, and new life potentially will begin.

As the narrator revisits the places where he grew up, he recalls the people and events that shaped him: the poor farming couple who took him in and lived little better than animals, and later the local man of property on whose estate he worked as a hired hand, and that man's two beautiful but unapproachable daughters. Eventually the narrator comes to understand that as his old friend said, to live in a hovel or a palace is the same thing, blood is the same color everywhere, and people everywhere are moved by similar desires for love or fortune.

In the later pages, the book moves rather schematically into the lives and disappointments of two of the secondary characters and the change in their family's fortunes. These were presented in a very cinematic way but struck me as contrived and less original, and I didn't enjoy this direction nearly as much. Story lines involving a third character and the wartime struggle between fascists and partisans were also introduced.

The motifs of moon and bonfire are threaded through the novel. The moon -- cold, severe, unchanging -- is likened to traditions or superstitions that can't be understood fully by those born outside the locality, and that can't be broken without retribution. The narrator claimed he didn't believe in this kind of moon. He also called a foreign land where he'd lived the moon, since it felt so alien he couldn't put down roots.

Bonfires, when the narrator was growing up, were lit in the countryside because the older generation believed they brought rain to refertilize the earth. They seemed to call to mind more positive feelings of a link to the land. There was also a childhood memory of seeing a distant bonfire on a hill that reinforced the narrator's longing to see faraway places. Another ritual use of a bonfire is revealed later.

I enjoyed this book most when it stayed with the narrator's life and his own thoughts, recalled in a quietly expressive and often melancholy way: the sights and smells of the village and the land. The memory of and longing for home, but rejection of its squalor, ignorance and violence. The longing to break free of restrictions, but dissatisfaction with a foreign land because it doesn't feel like home. And the passing of time and life:

"What is left of it all, of our life at La Mora? For years afterwards, a gust of perfume from lime trees in the evening had been enough to make me feel a different being, to feel my real self, without quite knowing why. One thing I always think about is how many people there must be living in this valley and in the world, for that matter, and the very same things are happening to them now as happened to us then, and they don't know it and never give it a thought. Maybe there's a house with girls living in it . . . and there's probably someone like me who wants to go away and make his fortune -- and in summer they thresh the grain and gather the grapes, and they hunt in winter, and there's a terrace, too, and everything happens the way it happened to us. That's how things are. They haven't changed a bit, boys or women or the world. They don't carry parasols any more and on Sunday they go to the cinema instead of the festa . . . and the girls smoke, and yet life is still the same and they don't know that one day they'll look round about them and for them, too, it will all be over."

After many years in America, Anguilla, the narrator, returns to his native Italian village and begins slowly to piece together his early life. With the help of his old friend, Nuto, he compares his memories of the past with what he finds in the present.