Devil in the Hills     by Cesare Pavese, Translated by D.D. Paige Original title: Diavolo sulle colline, La bella estate Original language: Italian Published by Greenwood Press Pub. Date: June 1, 1976 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover, 190 pages ISBN: 0837184096 List Price: $15.00 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £9.54 Published by Peter Owen Publishers Pub. Date: April 2002 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 190 pages ISBN: 0720611180 List Price: $19.95, £9.95 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide Published by Sceptre Pub. Date: 1990 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback List Price: £4.99 Not available for ordering

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In The Devil in the Hills Pavese contrasts the city (post-war Turin) with a countryside still partly inhabited by ‘real folks’ but already becoming a playground for the Northern Italian idle rich who both fascinated and appalled him. As in Among Women Only, he contrasts upwardly mobile, hard-working youths with distracted, spoilt, rich kids. There’s a dialogue too between various moral codes personified by different characters: we have a highly observant Catholic maiden aunt full of priest-speak, a millionaire’s son who drifts rudderless between cocaine, adultery and suicide and a narrator who seems to operate an even more tiresome compromise between these two extremes.


Especially enjoyable is Pavese’s celebration of physicality, of the human body in the sunlight or in water, the body close to nature — different from today’s exercise-culture which seems to involve so much in the way of machinery, special outfits, food-supplements and so on. Pavese’s vision, like that of Albert Camus or even D.H.Lawrence, reflects nature in a less mediated way.

‘That sun bath had become almost a vice, though by now we were tanned all over. On the first Sunday we didn’t go down but spent the noon hour in front of the church in the festive crowd, listening to Mass from the doorway amid a confusion of boys, organ music, and bells. But I greatly missed being naked and flattened out between the earth and the sun...

To Pieretto, who was looking sardonically at Oreste’s neck, I whispered: «Can you imagine these people naked in the sun like us?»’ p325

‘Dark and beautiful, The Devil in the Hills reads like an American Music Club album . . . It’s a tragic, brooding novel . . . Unmissable.’ –Uncut