The works of Cesare Pavese remain among the most widely known and read by the Italian public even now, nearly forty years after the writer's suicide in 1950. This was an event of such a deep emotional resonance that the development of an impartial and dispassionate debate on the literary value of Pavese's work has been hampered.

After the shock of Pavese's death had been absorbed, his work began being dissected with the voyeuristic goal of "finding" some evidence of psychological disease. Poems and short stories became the favorite targets of this autopsy. Perhaps because of the fragmentary nature of their conception, they were thought to have given voice to personal problems, with the implication that the prime material had to be autobiographical in origin. With time, though, this hypothesis has failed to produce a return comparable to the critical investment it attracted.

Stories, a new anthology that presents an intelligent and well-measured selection of Pavese's short stories, may be just what is needed for a new assessment. Although the editor and translator in the introductions falls victim to the conditioned-reflex interpretation lamented above, the criteria of his choice seem to have been based on a much deeper understanding of Pavese's production than is usually the case.

In Stories, Pavese's favorite atmospheres and settings receive their well-deserved prominence. Hilly countryside landscapes, taverns, pink-and-green-light ballrooms of an urban periphery, the Po river, are all clearly displayed, together with the themes of loneliness, the struggle to "take part in life," the painful realization of an emotional disorder. This selection also covers the range of styles and narrative structures, as well as experiments, as demonstrated by the fragment "The Beggars," lone representative of many false starts.

The anthology is most faithful in concentrating on Pavese's most typical element, structurally and narratively: the character of a lone male, in conflict with his own nature, in different phases of life, from boyhood to maturity. As a boy, the protagonist is led by a mysterious energy into incomprehensible adventures: in search of mythical snakes ("The Name"); in the company of wiser and more experienced friends ("First Love"); as an orphan working on a farm ("Festival Night").

In these stories we witness the adolescent's unconscious suppression of instinctive sexual knowledge, as a protection against a psychological trauma. In "The Leather Jacket," for example, the narrator is ignorant of the sexual nature of the power-game between Ceresa and his unfaithful live-in lover, Nora, until her death at the hand of Ceresa. A similar unawareness appears in "Villa on the Hill," in which a young man, once a childhood friend of Ginia, the house's mistress, is invited for an evening with a group of people he does not know. The narrator's attention is caught by another young man, apart from the crowd, who, with his attitude towards Ginia, implies the rightful expectation of her special attention by virtue of an unspecified yet flaunted previous intimacy. The apex of the story is the revelation of Ginia's pregnancy, a condition implied in the subtext of the other guests' conversations.

As Pavese's protagonist is called upon to play the role of adult, the focus of the stories shifts towards either problematic relationships or the lack of them. A series of these stories presents the man as an immature, grown-up adolescent, the pathetic victim of a self-delusion of love. The characterization of the woman is in turn very interesting: whether a professional prostitute ("The Idol"), a lonely and courageous unwed mother ("The Family"), or an innocent girl seduced by a married brute ("Three Girls"), she represents an individual who, from personal experience, has learned strength and has acquired self-respect. In "The Idol" Guido discovers Mina, an old girlfriend, working in a brothel. Obsessed with her, he gives up his job as a travelling salesman to spend hours in a café across the street from the bordello waiting for her. Guido first offers, then asks and finally begs Mina to marry him. As he regresses into infantile behavior and becomes jealous of one of her clients, Mina spells out the distance between them: "Mina shrugged: 'He is a good client.' After a moment she went on: 'He wants to marry me.' She looked straight at me, then dropped her eyes. 'Now, Guido,' she murmured, her voice hard. 'Don't be a silly boy.'"

In "The Family," Corradino runs into Cate, an ex-lover ("I really did think you'd be married," she murmured. "You know I am not the type," he replied.). As is his nature, he tries to establish a relationship based on her sexual dependency, but is thrown off balance by her selfreliance. When she tells him that she has a child and later reveals that Corradino himself is the father, the man is unable to extricate himself from the vicious circle of double-guesses that constitutes his inner reality: "It was clear that, if Cate wanted nothing from him, she was telling the truth and Dino was his son. If, on the other hand, Cate had ended by trying to trap him or get something from him (What? Marriage? or just money?) then some doubt might remain."

In yet another series of stories the outcome of this emotional imbalance takes the form of self-destruction and proudly flaunted misogyny. The characters desperately try to rationalize their inadequacies by preaching the virile virtues of being single ("Friends"), or their rejection of paternity ("Free Will").

The next step on this ideal ladder into the abyss leads from rationalization to full awareness. The process towards selfishness, emotional sado-masochism and inner death reaches its peak in "Wedding Trip" and "Suicides." The main characters tell with pain and horror of their crippled psychological realities manifested in inner lives full of resentment and anger towards the ones who love them most. With lucid desperation they see themselves trapped between the guilt and the pain caused by the consciousness of their nature, and the impossibility of changing it.

In "Wedding Trip" the psychological intricacies of the man's perception of his relationship with Cilia are played against a background of suppressed anger and resentful derision that frustrate her efforts to establish harmony between them. The mechanism at play is a classic one: Cilia's love and care make him aware of an emotional block and trigger angry reactions originally directed at himself but deflected onto another object, i.e. Cilia, by the perverted logic of psychological self-preservation.

The same character-type appears in "Suicides," where a man remorselessly manipulates women into providing him with sexual gratification, with no emotional exchange on his part. Caught in a relationship with a woman who desperately loves him, but whom he despises, he leads her to suicide, thus ridding himself of a burden. Narrating this story in retrospect, he reveals the profound distortions of his personality: "It is to a woman that I owe my present condition, [with] no hope of forging a closer link with the world at large, disliked by the next man, disliked by my mother whom I support. . . . But would things have turned out differently with any other woman? I mean, who would be capable of humbling me as my nature demands?"

Solitude finds its extreme, almost symbolic, expression in the character of the prisoner, as in "Intruder" and "Gaol Birds," where human interactions are reduced to little more than coded messages revealing feelings and thoughts too close to the surface to be suppressed. In "Land of Exile" Pavese portrays a paradigmatic condition of loneliness, with obvious references to his own personal experience of political exile. The character is seen alone and remote, trapped between a wind-swept barren landscape on one side, and the eerie sterility of the winter sea on the other.

Landscapes still have a very important role in "Land of Exile," the first short story Pavese wrote. Later, he abandoned the safeguards of naturalism to venture into an aesthetics defined by the dynamic interaction of the textual components. While the themes do not change significantly from the poems of Lavorare stanca, Pavese's creative effort organized the narrative material into new expressions. The results of this successful operation enabled him to expand further into the composition of more ambitious works, first novellas, then, finally, novels. In this regard, Pavese's literary experiences reproduce an exemplary linear development towards more complex modes and structures, with the various phases accumulating as successive strata.

That the short stories were not simply a mere experiment, or a warm-up exercise before bigger and better exploits, is also clearly demonstrated by their polished form and highly sensitive function of conveying some of Pavese's most painful and unadorned observations on the human spirit.

Although in Stories the translation at times fails to capture Pavese's instinct for rhythm, it nevertheless does justice to his uncanny ability to create ambiguity and indistinctiveness both in the characters and the action, which force upon the reader the task of uncompromising attention to the text and its subtleties.