(This review breaks the rules of the Babel Guide; this book is neither in print nor a work of fiction we wanted to introduce it to our readers anyway.)This Business of Living is Pavese’s dialogue with himself and his dialogue with us, written in the years of his greatest achievements as a writer and ending with his suicide. A hard review to write because I’ve been reading this book for nearly 20 years, keeping it on my bedside table, alongside Albert Camus’ Notebooks. Part of the attraction is that this small book touches on such a huge range of topics; on the books Pavese himself read and commented on; on moral and philosophical issues he was concerned with as well as his continual and sometimes tortured self-analysis. There is present here the wide world of an active, energetic intellectual, a man bent on critically understanding everything that comes before him. This Business of Living is the mirror of a personality that transcends the limitations of most human lives; the personality of a genius.


In Pavese one sees the two aspects of the 20th century creative genius; the being very close to the culture or world one springs from and the state of feeling far outside of it. Pavese, who describes so intimately the thoughts and feelings of others was famously a loner, a non-conformist, an awkward character, living at a great distance from other people and suffering for that. Yet his two greatest works of fiction The Moon and the Bonfire and Among Women Only, show his closeness to things, to a landscape and to the social beat of a great city respectively — Pavese lived in great intimacy with his beloved places, rather like Pasolini who wrote ‘I spend the greater part of my life beyond the edges of the city... I love life with such violence and such intensity that no good can come of it. I am speaking of the physical side of life: the sun, the grass, youth. It is an addiction more terrible than cocaine. It doesn’t cost anything, and it is available in vast quantities...how it will all end, I don’t know.’ (quoted in S.Pacifici From Verisimo to Existentialism London 1969)


A diary of such a great writer, a writer with such a fierce connection with life, is an unfathomably rich work that one can enter again and again always finding more. It is also shows that a diary can be a very complex work of art, one that uses a very basic narrative logic, the march of time itself. Within that straightforward structure anything can happen as the connections between entries are made only by the mental structure of the diary’s author, and with the passage of time.


Although completed almost 50 years ago, This Business of Living can be considered today as one of the most contemporary works translated from Italian into English.

5th March 1939

‘...only gradually do we come to understand that our way of life is our own creation; in all its minute ramifications it is the expression of our experience. The troubles of young people are born of the impossibility of making their own experience coincide with the broad, stylized impression they have gained of the world. Any profession, any social status, seems to a young man remote and unattainable, until, little by little, he has created his own status and profession — totally different, in their slow, inner growth, from the clumsy vision he imagined and dreaded. But then he is a man.’ p82