Return of the Native

THE MOON AND THE BONFIRES (206 pp.)--Cesare Pavese--Farrar, Straus & Young ($3).

Cesare Pavese is the latest of the younger Italian novelists to be published in the U.S.--and the latest to be found looking at life in despair. In the last 40 pages of his novel, a Piedmontese peasant tramples his mistress and mother-in-law to death, sets fire to his hut, and hangs himself. An unmarried girl becomes pregnant, has an abortion and dies. Her half-sister turns prostitute and plays informer to both the Fascists and the partisans; she winds up in front of a machine gun and her body is burned in a brush pile. In 1950, at the age of 42, Author Pavese confirmed his bleak views of the human situation by committing suicide.

The Moon and the Bonfires is a return-of-the-native story in which Author Pavese develops a familiar 20th century theme, the need for roots. After 20 years of roaming, some of it in the U.S., his nameless narrator-hero comes back to the Piedmontese village of his boyhood. Born a bastard, he gets no prodigal's welcome, but the villagers who remember him are deferential before his hard-won rise to respectability. Wifeless and childless, he has few bonds with the future, is bent only on uncovering his links with the past.

Most of the links prove to be rusty or broken. His old employer is dead. And the employer's daughter, a girl who longed to marry well, has settled for a cheap cardsharp. The local priest is a sly opportunist, and the villagers are clamped in the narrow vise of ignorance.

Only the hard-bitten earth, the taste of bread and cheese, and boyhood's memories seem to have kept their force for the wanderer. Author Pavese writes of each of these with simple eloquence: "How often I'd seen the noisy carts go by, with women and boys lined up on them, going to the feast, to the fair, going to the merry-go-rounds . . . while I stayed . . .

under the hazels, under the fig tree, on the parapet of the bridge, on those long summer evenings . . . Those were the evenings when a light--a bonfire on the distant hills--made me scream and roll on the ground, because I was poor, because I was a boy, because I was nothing." In the end, the hero hardly knows whether he is sorrier that he can't go home again or that he once left. By clenching his writing fist in melodramatic symbols and seizures at his own riddle, Author Pavese loses his grip on the realities he writes best about: the sun-drenched Italian soil and a small boy's growing pains.

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