Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
An Absurd Vice: A Biography of Cesare Pavese

An Absurd Vice: A Biography of Cesare Pavese

Lajolo, Davide

Paperback

Series: Biography of Cesare Pavese

Literary FiguresLiterary Criticism

ISBN10: 0811208516
ISBN13: 9780811208512
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Published: Apr 17 1983
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.67
Height: 0.72 Width: 5.21 Depth: 7.93
Language: English
An Absurd Vice, the critical biography of Cesare Pavese by his friend and fellow-writer Davide Lajolo, has been celebrated in Italy since its publication there in 1960. With well-balanced affection and blame, it presents a portrait of the prize-winning author of the House on the Hill, Work Wearies and other books of fiction and poetry, dedicated editor at the Einaudi Publishing House, and renowned translator of such classics as David Copperfield and Moby-Dick, who was yet unable to shake what he ruefully called his absurd vice- a lifelong obsession with suicide. Mine would be a biography to be written with a scalpel, Pavese once told Lajolo, I am made up of too many parts that do not blend. Born in rural Piedmont in 1908, Pavese returned, throughout his working life in the city of Turin, to his native hills for solace and inspiration. His friends and admirers included the great Italian literati of the day, yet he remained a lonely man who, after losing his first love, never made his peace with womankind. Several of his friends lost their lives in World War II and the Italian civil war of resistance, and Pavese himself spent a year in exile. But in 1950, having survived the Fascist era, believing Communism to offer hope for his country's future, and at the height of his fame, he nevertheless took his own life. Translated and edited with an introduction by Mario and Mark Pietralunga.

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