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Exile. Not so much a separation from a place as a severance from one’s earlier life. The exile’s return is a trip not through space but time, through a present landscape that sullies, pollutes, and eventually destroys one’s own history. Cesare Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfire. When memories succumb to geography.

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Another war novel, for sure. But we doubt if this magnificent book, one of the great evocations of an exile’s return, is about the war; for it has bigger themes to explore, existential crises to suffer. The war. The war is here to add colour and drama to life’s theatre; it is the harsh lighting that illuminates centre stage, exposing our hero’s agonies. Exile. The return. And adolescence’s end. War is when our youth dies, never to be resurrected; such a loss resonating more than any army corpse or partisan gun. 

On first contact the exile is flooded with memories, overwhelming him with melancholy. The hero brimful of emotion, these rocks, rivers, woods and fields are empty of it. Suddenly cut off from a past he once inhabited intimately for years. All feels so very thin. These hills and valleys drained of the feelings once inseparable from his being. Never more alone than when we return home. In place of embedded emotion, one’s self and landscape a single terrain, there is sentimentality; a mental exercise in liking and loving. Cast out from the body the mind creates feelings not out of the senses but of ideas. Memories replacing what the body once experienced, recall dominates over osmosis. We feel sad. And react by burnishing those memories, until brass buttons shine like gold sovereigns. A lost paradise manufactured out of junk. The past now a fiction, a bittersweet fantasy.1 This outsider wilfully canoodles what he has lost.

…I crossed the Belbo by the footbridge and while I walked along, I kept thinking that there was nothing more beautiful than a well-hoed, well-kept vineyard, with properly shaped leaves and that smell of the earth baked in the August sunshine. A well-worked vineyard is like a healthy body that lives and breathes and sweats. And when I looked round me again, I thought of these clumps of trees and reeds and these spinneys and watercourses - all names of villages and houses round about - which are quite useless and don’t yield any harvest, yet nevertheless have their own beauty - each vineyard has its own patch of scrub - and give your pleasure when your eye lights on them and you know there are nests there. Women, I thought, have something of the same charm.

Adolescence is the second major theme, though told at a tangent, as our hero remembers his youth. We feel the excitement, despair and wonder of growing up; also how these emotions are recalled by the adult mind. Truths once experienced are now ideas inside the head, subtly altering their nature and meaning. This novel more about how lives are thought about than lived through.

His childhood was poor. But poverty itself is not what destroys a boy’s soul. The vitality of a child able to overcome even the most baleful circumstances. I hear a sceptical sigh, my friend having spent too long at the Freudian breast. My proof? The child’s rapid growth when given opportunities. His adopted parents forced out of their smallholding, Anguilla (the Eel) goes to work at La Mora, a wealthy farm, where he learns a trade and - crucially - widens his circle of acquaintances. At La Mora he experiences the stimulus of the rich;  this boy living in close proximity to their strange lifestyles, their beauty, their culture, their cultivated personalities; a life of leisurely insouciance, where desires flow freely as rivers. So free! So relaxed! At home anywhere. La Mora a foreign country where he learns a new language.

Nuto had said to Irene that she played like a professional and he could listen to her all day long. And Irene had called him on to the terrace then (I had gone with him, too), and with the window open had played difficult pieces, really lovely ones, whose sound filled the house, and which must have been heard as far as the vineyard with the green grapes, which was beside the road. I enjoyed it, I can tell you. Nuto listened with his lips pursed up as if he had put the clarinet to this mouth, and through the window I saw the flowers in the room, and the mirrors and Irene’s straight back and the effort of her arms, and her fair hair against the page. And I saw the hill and the vineyards and the watercourses and I realized that this music wasn’t the same as the stuff the band played, it spoke of other things, it wasn’t meant for Gaminella, nor for the trees beside the Belbo, nor for us. But in the distance towards Canelli you could see Il Nido against the outline of Salto, the fine red house, set among the yellowing plane trees. And the music Irene played went with the fine house, with the gentry at Canelli, it was meant for them.

‘No,’ cried Nuto at one point, ‘that was wrong!’ Irene had already corrected herself and started playing again, but she bent her head and looked at him for a moment, laughing and almost blushing. Then Nuto went into the room and turned over the pages for her and they talked about the music while Irene went on playing. I stayed on the terrace and kept on looking at Il Nido and Canelli.

At La Mora he meets his greatest influence, Nuto, older, highly intelligent, charismatic and a talented musician. Anguilla is dazzled. Nuto’s big personality, his knowledge of the world, his musical trips around the valley, encourages our hero to think of a life beyond the village. Like many disciples he is more successful than his master; for Nuto, being self-sufficient, lacks the impetus to leave his own self-created world.2 It is why, after making a name for himself in the region, Nuto decides to stay in his local town, where he gives up his music; his reason typically sharp but oblique. Only later do we discover the cause (though we must work it out for ourselves): his love of art destroyed by his disgust of war. Nuto has sunk down into the life of the artisan, while Anguilla makes it rich in America. The tortoise passes the hare. But the tortoise can never be his fleet-footed friend. Anguilla, now richer and more experienced than Nuto, prides himself on becoming his old pal’s equal. No! There can be no such equality; for Nuto remains the older “brother” teaching the gauche youngster, only now the lessons are about Anguilla’s own village, a lost past.

To return after so many years - it has been decades - is to become an alien to one’s place of birth. Nobody knows him. To these Italians Anguilla is an American; a country where he has never been at home. It is not just exile. In America people are strangers both to each other and to the land.3 Even the closest relationships are thin and instrumental. His own history has not been a happy one. The beautiful Rosanne, pretending to a love she does not feel, wants to use Anguilla’s commercial talents to set up a bar “on the coast” where she hopes to pick up a professional photographer. The ties do not bind in this country. One day she tells Anguilla she is leaving. In America you are alone, even when living with a woman.

Anguilla has come back to Italy to feel the solidity of emotional life, the rootedness of the land. He is to be disappointed. Leave a place too long and you will not return the same person. No longer a young boy to be chaffed and nursed, but a wealthy American whose pocket is picked: Anguilla transformed into a maker of dreams: a bank for any wild loan, a rich husband for some presentable woman. No longer a living person, he is an image, and a means to somebody’s happy end. The irony almost kills. To these locals Anguilla is merely useful. A true American! All that utility, its de-souling instrumentalism, reducing a man to a cardboard cutout, has followed him to Italy. A village lad no more.

A huge rubbish dump towers over a tiny flower bed. He visits the old cottage. Its realities are too much for those lovely memories. Confronted with the facts, the fanciful images manufactured by time fall away and Anguilla is forced to face the poverty of his old place, its human hardness, its violence. Everyone knows that Valino beats his women and his boy, an animal reflex to the harshness and futility of his life. This is not a pleasant country. But at least there is something to hold on to…. Wrong! The old place was never that solid. Memory a trickster flattering the exile’s greed for stability. Anguilla had overlooked that his adopted parents were forced out of the village. Nothing has changed only his clarity of sight. Now he sees the precariousness of Valino’s hold on the land: not only its poverty but the exactions of the cantankerous landlady could easily push him out. Nothing is secure here. Catastrophe always at the next tick of the clock. Such brutal conditions drive Valino mad. Beating his mother and sister-in-law to death, he burns the house down and kills himself. The land exacts it own lethal tax. A child’s solipsism hid this truth from our hero. A child is at home anywhere in the world. The adult an eternal exile (from that Edenic innocence). It is Anguilla’s eureka moment. Our roots appear to go down deep, but in truth they hardly break the surface. 

How come Anguilla could leave this world if so knotted together? Permanence is a state of mind. As set as concrete, as brittle as a biscuit…. Once upon a time it seemed impossible to leave the valley, like trying to swim the ocean; but once done this feels as easy as crossing the road. Of course this is an American thinking. A local would concentrate on the  width of that wide water.

A sweet melancholy makes you sentimental. Back in Italy he helps the Italians. At last Anguilla to be entangled in somebody else’s life. Still his old master, Nuto, calls (Anguilla never to escape that influence) as he acts as mentor to Valino’s boy. Success! He secures the boy an apprenticeship in his old friend’s workshop. But it is a complicated intervention. For why does he encourage Cinto to leave the valley? Aware of the ugly facts, Anguilla both wants to hide them with his social work and overcome them with such practical advice to the young as leave for better things! A torn man, his mind a confusion of memories, dreams and the depressing evidence of his senses. Woken up, he is yet half asleep.

It is a long time before Anguilla hears the alarm clock….

‘One morning Santa came back, under escort. She no longer wore the windbreaker and the slacks she had worn all these months. To come out of Canelli she had put on women’s clothes again and when the partisans and stopped her up by Gaminella, she’d got a shock. She had on her information about orders the fascists were sending out. But it didn't help her any. In our presence Baracca read out to her the numbers of those who had deserted at her instigation, the number of dumps we had lost, the number of men who had died because of her. Santa sat on a chair and listened, completely disarmed. She stared at me angrily, trying to catch my eye. Then Baracca read out the sentence and told two of them to take her outside. They were more bewildered than she was. They’d always seen her wearing her jacket and belt and they couldn’t get used to the idea that now they had a hold of her, she was dressed in white. They took her outside. She turned round at the door and looked at me and made a face just like a child. But, once outside, she tried to run away. We heard a cry and someone running and a burst of tommy-gun fire which seemed endless. We ran out, too, and saw her lying on the grass in front of the acacias.’

Santina was the most beautiful and vivacious of the three La Mora girls. Her history, enacted only after Anguilla leaves the valley (she was still a child when he left), embodies both a scintillating adolescence - its freedoms, its joie de vivre, its vivacity, its necessary demise - and the war itself, that cocaine hit of excitement and ecstasy. During the war she was the cynosure of the valley; as she worked for the fascists and became the lover of officials and army officers. We remember other accounts of the time that stress a woman’s freedom; their escape from taboo, the joy of the outcast, the pleasures of an immoral life.4 Santina is the exemplar. But the balance of the war shifts, relations metamorphose; the fascists now seen as the bad guys. To redeem her reputation she joins the partisans; alas, it is only a ploy: she is a fascist spy. It is now the symbols take over. In Santina we read the novel’s theme. She represents the experience of Anguilla’s return from exile. Those memories, their bright colours and glowing intensity, are a brilliant beauty that hides an ugly duplicity, the true facts of the case. The returning exile fakes his own past. Then the fraud is discovered. He is left alone before a firing-squad.

Review: The Moon and the Bonfire

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1. See William Hazlitt’s wonderful essay, Why Distant Objects Please in Table Talk.

2. Rupert Thomson’s Divided Kingdom suggests an answer to this puzzle: the highly intelligent and artistically inclined tend towards the phlegmatic. Enriched by their own minds they do not require the stimulus of travel or the variety of different places; it is enough to read about them, as here, with Nuto. The disciple - Anguilla - is less able to live inside the mind; his friend's stimulating presence forcing him to find concrete substitutes for the ideas and images that he has received.

3. For extreme examples: the short stories of Joy Williams and Mary Gaitskill.

4. The classic is Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day. See also my pieces on Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means and Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger.