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The Devil in the Hills

by Cesare Pavese, D.D. Paige (Translator)

3.74 of 5 stars 3.74 · rating details · 129 ratings · 3 reviews

Set amongst the hills, vineyards, and villages of Piedmont, this talecenters onthree young men as they spend what is seemingly their last free summer talking, drinking, andenjoying life. Fascinated with their wealthy acquaintance, Poli, they soon find themselvesembedded in his world—his cocaine addiction, his blasphemy, and his corrupt circle of friends....more

Paperback, 220 pages

Published October 1st 2001 by Peter Owen Publishers (first published 1948)

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Jul 10, 2011 Greg rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Do you know whom I (along with just about every other person in the civilized world) hate? Hipsters!* I know it's not much of a surprise. I think they might be the most hated group of people in the history of the world. Even hipsters hate hipsters! That can't be said of other hated groups, like say members of the Klu Klux Klan or Neo-Nazis.

I only mention my obvious disdain for hipsters (am I a hipster, well obviously no, almost no one will admit to being one, but while my tastes border along the...more Do you know whom I (along with just about every other person in the civilized world) hate? Hipsters!* I know it's not much of a surprise. I think they might be the most hated group of people in the history of the world. Even hipsters hate hipsters! That can't be said of other hated groups, like say members of the Klu Klux Klan or Neo-Nazis.

I only mention my obvious disdain for hipsters (am I a hipster, well obviously no, almost no one will admit to being one, but while my tastes border along the tastes of aging hipsters at times I just have nothing positive going for me that would make me at all 'hip', but feel free to think of me as one if you would like and I might be thinking of you as one too) because this book is basically a hipster novel, except that it's from Italy in the 1920's or early 30's (I'm too bored to look up exactly when, let's just say before Mussolini, or before WWII). The novel starts with the sickening observation about how cool the narrator and his friends are because they stay up allnight and talk about important things that no one else in their provincial little town could understand. Oh great, you're just like every kid who spends all night in a Denny's in America (I'd say these days but I don't know what kids do now, but I'll say back when I was a snotty know-it-all teenager / early twentysomething). Leaving aside all historical shit, this novel is basically just a me and my cool friends that are so misunderstood do some stuff that we think is cool and so much above what the 'squares' do or understand.

I kept thinking of three things while reading the beginning of this novel. One was a friend of mine when I was about the age of the characters here, and how much he was like them and how even then his affectations annoyed me, the second thing were the scenes in The Subterraneans where the Kerouac and Co. stand-ins were in jazz clubs showing off how 'into' it all they were, and the third was any of the Doug skits from the MTV show "The State" (one of which can be seen here: http://www.mtv.com/videos/misc/170251...).

Now that I have finished the novel I know that I'm being a little unfair in dismissing the novel as an early proto-hipster (oh man you might have called them different things but the 1920's I'm sure were jam packed with some equivalent of hipsters) novel. Yeah, towards the end there are some interesting parts to the novel, but all in all it's just the same as reading any novel that's primary raison d'etre seems to be to show how 'cool' the characters are (in a hipster-ish note, when other hipster-ish characters arrive in this book, the main hipsters immediately feel like the out of towners are poseurs, see hipsters have never liked other hipsters and can feel the inauthenticity immediately), it's just a matter of substituting different activities for different time periods.

I'm being unfair though. I know I am. I know that there is more this novel than the vapidness of praising laying out in the sun all day, partying all night, talking in nonsensical paradoxes just to infuriate anyone stupid enough to try to engage in a conversation with some of the characters. But all of those things just seemed to screaming for my attention and anything subtle in the novel got lost in the 'look how cool' I was in my youth feeling that the novel has.

*This has no relevance to the review, but do you know which hipsters I hate the most of all of them lately (lately being June/July 2011)? Hipsters with tattoos or jewelry of brass-knuckles. Every time I see one of them I want to punch them really hard, their ironic posturing of safe-retro-violence makes me want to bring down real violence on to them. Fucking hipsters.(less)

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Aug 04, 2011 Todd Grimson rated it 5 of 5 stars

Somewhat forgotten now, Pavese was the most "Americanized" of Italian novelists, having translated Hemingway, Faulkner and others. This had the effect of making his own prose especially lucid and clear when translated into English. THE DEVIL IN THE HILLS at times reminded me in flavor of an imaginary lost novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald at the top of his form.

Pavese committed suicide in his 40s, but this and THE HOUSE IN THE HILLS remain... all of his novels are good.

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Jul 09, 2010 Julia Boechat Machado rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: italian-literature, wanna-buy, 1940s

Logo no início, Oreste pergunta ao narrador e a Pieretto o que eles fizeram de noite e o narrador pensa que tinham ouvido a conversa de um bêbado, olhado os coladores de cartazes, dado uma volta pelo mercado e visto passarem as ovelhas. Já Pieretto diz que tinham conhecido uma mulher, explica como se deve passar na frente da sacada de uma mulher, a noite toda, para que ela acorde e sinta no sangue...
Pavese escreve desse modo, que parece simples mas é absurdamente lírico.
Eu o adoro.

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About Cesare Pavese

Pavese was born in a small town in which his father, an official, owned property. He attended school and later, university, in Turin. Denied an outlet for his creative powers by Fascist control of literature, Pavese translated many 20th-century U.S. writers in the 1930s and '40s: Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner; a 19th-cent...more Pavese was born in a small town in which his father, an official, owned property. He attended school and later, university, in Turin. Denied an outlet for his creative powers by Fascist control of literature, Pavese translated many 20th-century U.S. writers in the 1930s and '40s: Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner; a 19th-century writer who influenced him profoundly, Herman Melville (one of his first translations was of Moby Dick); and the Irish novelist James Joyce. He also published criticism, posthumously collected in La letteratura americana e altri saggi (1951; American Literature, Essays and Opinions, 1970). His work probably did more to foster the reading and appreciation of U.S. writers in Italy than that of any other single man.

A founder and, until his death, an editor of the publishing house of Einaudi, Pavese also edited the anti-Fascist review La Cultura. His work led to his arrest and imprisonment by the government in 1935, an experience later recalled in “Il carcere” (published in Prima che il gallo canti, 1949; in The Political Prisoner, 1955) and the novella Il compagno (1947; The Comrade, 1959). His first volume of lyric poetry, Lavorare stanca (1936; Hard Labour, 1976), followed his release from prison. An initial novella, Paesi tuoi (1941; The Harvesters, 1961), recalled, as many of his works do, the sacred places of childhood. Between 1943 and 1945 he lived with partisans of the anti-Fascist Resistance in the hills of Piedmont.

The bulk of Pavese's work, mostly short stories and novellas, appeared between the end of the war and his death. Partly through the influence of Melville, Pavese became preoccupied with myth, symbol, and archetype. One of his most striking books is Dialoghi con Leucò (1947; Dialogues with Leucò, 1965), poetically written conversations about the human condition. The novel considered his best, La luna e i falò (1950; The Moon and the Bonfires, 1950), is a bleak, yet compassionate story of a hero who tries to find himself by visiting the place in which he grew up. Several other works are notable, especially La bella estate (1949; in The Political Prisoner, 1955). Shortly after receiving the Strega Prize for it, Pavese committed suicide in his hotel room by taking an overdose of pills.
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