Today I came across among the on-sale books (at the Uni bookshop) a fairly new book by Italo Calvino, HERMIT IN PARIS, and took it up and opened randomly to this page. I casually began reading and at once captivated by the almost electric current flowing through the following passage:
Of course no one in Italian literature followed the Pavese route. Neither in terms of language, nor in that way he had of extracting a poetic tension from a realistic, objective story, and not even in his despair, which initially seemed the element that was most likely to catch on. (Even internal suffering is something seasonal; who today wants to suffer?) Pavese has gone back to being 'the most isolated voice in Italian poetry', as the blurb read on an old edition of his LAVORARE STANCA, a blurb dictated, I think, by himself. (123)
I've got to read all of Pavese and Calvino in the original... But when shall I have time to do that? One day I'll spend a whole summer in San Remo, in that splendid b&b called SoleMare!
