The Moon and the Bonfires by Cesare Pavese: Summary, Characters and Themes

Two months of writing, in 1949

The Treccani entry in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani dates the composition of «The Moon and the Bonfires» to the stretch between September and November 1949, with publication by Einaudi, in Turin, the following year; Wikipedia adds the month, April. The same Treccani entry calls it the last novel by Cesare Pavese, and Wikipedia describes it as the book that closes his career as a novelist. Pavese took his own life on 26-27 August of that same year, 1950, a few months after the book appeared.

Treccani also notes the pace of the prose: broader and more fluent than in the earlier novels, close to a classical, georgic rhythm, where the return to the land the narrator came from turns into a return to the land and nothing else.

Anguilla’s story

The narrator has no name. A reader learns only the nickname the village uses, Anguilla, and that he is a foundling. The book opens with his arrival back in Italy after the Liberation: he had emigrated to the United States and made his fortune there, and the English Wikipedia entry puts the absence at twenty-five years. Almost as soon as he is back, while the smells and the sights of childhood come to meet him, his mind goes to the moment when, as a newborn, he was abandoned.

The countryside and the village he finds are not the ones he left. The war and the passing years have changed the people deeply: it is the mark World War 2 left on the village Anguilla comes back to.

Farming country and the people who work it were already the material of Italian fiction with Giovanni Verga and Verismo. Here, though, the point of view is that of someone who had left.

Nuto, Cinto and the village

Two figures stand beside the narrator and stay in the reader’s memory. Nuto is the close friend, and Wikipedia describes him as determined, shrewd and knowing. Cinto is a boy with a severe deformity of the legs.

The return that does not put him back together

Silverio Novelli, in a 2010 piece for Treccani’s Italian language portal, reads the novel as the place where the Odyssean myth of return meets the necessity of narrative language, the kind of language able to say that a destiny cannot be escaped. On his reading, the return fails in its aim of taking back a lost identity, and ends by deepening and settling for good the feeling of belonging to nothing. Novelli also calls it a book that settles every account with the past, and it is in those pages that Pavese quotes Shakespeare: «Ripeness is all.»

The journey home gives the novel its shape; on Novelli’s reading it is not a resolution for the man making it.

How the narrative is built

Wikipedia points out a feature that can wrong-foot a first reading. The novel does not tell its story in detail or in sequence: it places side by side episodes that, on the face of it, have no link, and what holds them together are the narrator’s thoughts and reflections. The reader assembles the story the way you would listening to someone remember out loud, jumping back and forth.

The Italian title is «La luna e i falò», and the nickname Anguilla is carried into English as «Eel».