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Archipelago Books

The Leucothea Dialogues

The Leucothea Dialogues

by Cesare Pavese, translated from the Italian by Minna Zallman Proctor

$22.00
$22.00
Available as E-Book Italian Literature
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Cesare Pavese's The Leucothea Dialogues is peopled with gods, centaurs, clouds, poets, hunters, snakes, and nymphs. These are the beings who spoke to him through the ancient plays and poems he read in primary school. Here they speak again in the twenty-seven dialogues that form the novel. Pavese calls mythology a "hothouse of symbols." His hothouse is liveliest at night, in the peculiar clarity of darkness. Pavese's characters are more than "characters," they play like the dreams of earliest childhood, they pose questions that seem to travel through the minds of the dead to the minds of the living and back again. Through reeds, shadows, glens, fields of blazing straw, homes and villages on the edges of valleys, and over cliffs, we follow their harried stories. In Minna Zallman Proctor's radiant translation, The Leucothea Dialogues is an expression of an exhilarating intelligence.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781962770378
Pages: 250
Publication Date:

Praise

Pavese, to me, is a constant source of inspiration.
—Jhumpa Lahiri

There can be no excuse for not reading Pavese, one of the few essential novelists of the mid-twentieth century.
—Susan Sontag

This is how writers in our ever-worsening world should write.
—Saul Bellow

Pavese's nine short novels make up the most dense, dramatic and homogeneous narrative cycle of modern Italy, and are also . . . the richest in representing social ambiances, the human comedy, the chronicle of a society. But above all they are works of an extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meanings . . . Each one of Pavese's novels revolves around a hidden theme, something unsaid which is the real thing he wants to say.
—Italo Calvino

There is something about Pavese . . . that is insinuating, haunting and lyrically pervasive."
—The New York Times Book Review

One of the word's great creative depressives.
— Tim Parks, The Daily Telegraph

There is nothing with quite this passionate intensity and purity in American poetry . . . Hard Labor shows us Pavese at the outset of his own ultimately tragic career, writing poetry of courageous originality, intelligence, and power."
—Jonathan Galassi, The New York Times

Cesare Pavese is one of those singular, disruptive poets, like Blake or Lawrence, who go against the grain—or the flow—of their culture, and for whom precedents would be as hard to find as successors . . . His marvelously peopled poems not only document the time—what Calvino called 'the Pavese era'—but also bear witness to a unique and restless intelligence.
—Jamie McKendric, The Guardian

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