The House on the Hill
By (Author) Cesare Pavese
Translated by Tim Parks
Penguin Books Ltd
Penguin Classics
3rd August 2021
29th April 2021
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Fiction in translation
Narrative theme: Politics
823.914
Paperback
176
Width 130mm, Height 198mm, Spine 11mm
135g
A devastating novel set in wartime Italy from the great twentieth-century writer, in a new translation by Tim Parks Shortlisted for The Society of Authors Translation Award 2022 June, 1943. Allied aircraft are bombing industrial Turin; Fascist Italy seems to be on its knees. Corrado, a teacher, is staying in relative safety in the hills above the city. He has no attachments and claims to be happy that way. But against his better judgement he is drawn into a circle of anti-fascists who congregate at a nearby tavern. As the authorities' net closes around his friends, Corrado must face a painful choice- emotional and political commitment, with all its dangers - or devastating retreat.
Pavese is one of the few essential novelists of the mid-twentieth century -- Susan Sontag
Pavese's nine short novels make up the most dense, dramatic, and homogeneous narrative cycle of modern Italy ... But above all they are works of an extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meanings -- Italo Calvino
Cesare Pavese's cool, contemplative voice was the most important among postwar Italian writers -- W. S. DiPiero
Insinuating, haunting and lyrically pervasive * The New York Times Book Review *
Cesare Pavese (Author) Cesare Pavese was born in 1908 in Santo Stefano Belbo, a village in the hills of Piedmont. He worked as a translator (of Melville, Joyce and Faulkner) and as an editor for the publishing house Einaudi Editore, while also publishing his own poetry and a string of successful novels, including The House on the Hill and The Moon and the Bonfires. Never actively anti-Fascist himself, he was nevertheless sent into internal exile in Calabria in 1935 for having aided other subversives. He killed himself in 1950, shortly after receiving Italy's most prestigious literary prize, the Strega. Tim Parks (Translator) Tim Parks moved to Italy in 1981 and lives in Milan. Well known for his non-fiction writings on Italy - Italian Neighbours, An Italian Education - and his novels - Europa (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Destiny, In Extremis - he has translated a number of Italian writers, in particular Macchiavelli, Leopardi, Moravia, Calvino, Tabucchi and Calasso. He has twice been awarded the John Florio Prize for Translation from the Italian.