The Beautiful Summer by Cesare Pavere
A review of Cesare Pavere’s The Beautiful Summer
“She had wanted to behave like a fully grown woman and it had not come off.”
The Beautiful Summer by Cesare Pavese / La bella estate (1949). Published in English by Penguin.
Cesare Pavere—a renowned, contemporary figure in Italian literature. Born in the countryside of Italy in the early 1900s, he was capable of turning the Italian countryside, previously considered mundane and unappealing, into something that was very lyrical, a striking setting as the backdrop of his work.
I had known very well of Pavere until now, but I hadn’t read any of his work. Impressive, because his poetry is partially online and free to read, and because his prose is so well known. Pavere didn’t live a long life, but he became an icon of Italian literature due to the depth and quality of his work. He committed suicide due to depression when he was only forty-one years old, leaving behind several manuscripts.
I received a copy of The Beautiful Summer years ago for Christmas, but hadn’t gotten the chance to read it, which was shocking. The Beautiful Summer is a slim novella, one of only roughly one hundred pages. This is a wee deceptive, however, because I found the words on the page to be quite close together and that made it a bit more difficult to read as someone with dyslexic problems.
And so now, while I’m on a reading kick, I thought to pick up my copy the day after binge-reading Pachinko in one sitting, and actually get deep to the heart of Pavese’s work. And so here we go! Let’s begin this review.
Book Blurb
Italy, 1930s. It's the height of summer, and sixteen-year-old Ginia is desperate for adventure. So begins a fateful friendship with Amelia, a stylish and sophisticated artist's model who envelops her in a dazzling new world of bohemian artists and intoxicating freedom. Under the spell of her new friends, Ginia soon falls in love with Guido, an enigmatic young painter. It's the start of a desperate love affair, charged with false hope and overwhelming passion - destined to last no longer than the course of a summer.
The Beautiful Summer is a gorgeous coming-of-age tale of lost innocence and first love, by one of Italy's greatest writers.
Content / Characters / Writing
The descriptions of the setting, 1930s Italy, are so beautiful! It’s in muggy, humid Italy. This novella follows our main character, Ginia, and she meets Amelia. Amelia is a woman who poses nude for the local art school, and she seems quite scandalous to the society. Ginia, however, very much wants to be her, and she accompanies her to meet all the local artists on the scene. There, she falls in love for the first time.
It’s a very simple plot at the end of the day, and in a way it’s this kind of coming-of-age story but set in Italy during the era Pavere was alive during. Because it’s a simple plot, a lot of the meat of content tends to go into developing the characters and their relationships to each other. I really liked the relationship between Ginia and Amelia, and I honestly kind of wish this were an LGBTQ+ novel. I think it would’ve been an extremely fascinating premise to explore how Amelia’s quote-on-quote promiscuous nature (e.g. her willingly posing nude for art students in a smaller town) allows Ginia to be with her and discover sexuality. But, alas, we’re talking about this being published in 1949, so we’re not getting that tale.
They do kiss, however. Amelia is blatantly bisexual in the novella and there’s hints of other characters potentially being gay. I just wish that Amelia’s influence on Ginia isn’t depicted as leading her astray from some innocent path, because Amelia, in a way, is blamed for the lifestyle that Ginia adopts and her obsession with an artist, thus leading to her losing her innocence. I think maybe that this novel needed to be longer, to flesh out the characters even more and the consequences of everything going on. The nude modeling might be prostitution, there might be a lot of gayness, Ginia might be forced to be living in sexist ideologies, but we’ll never know the true answers to all of this.
I could tell Pavere was a poet by his writing; very lyrical, very image-heavy with an eye to detail. This book flows extremely well from scene to scene, and nothing felt forced at all. I’m admiring his writing; this is the way I, too, want to write. It seems so effortless but we know that behind the scenes all of this is meticulously crafted into a beautiful novella.
Overall Thoughts
It’s an okay novella. It needs to be longer, and the writing is beautiful enough to keep it going, but I’m a little bit frustrated with it. It needs more depth than what is has, which may explain my frustration. I’ll read Pavere’s poetry, but it might take me a hot minute to try and read any of his fiction again after this one.
