"La luna e i falò": tra prosa e poesia

Abstract

After the Thirties, trends in Italian narrative are towards delyricization. Cesare Pavese follows this trend, but, as he isn’t fond of middle tones, he doesn’t come to a ‘degree zero’ writing. This is clear from the way Pavese deals with regional e dialectal lexicon in La luna e i falò (assimilating dialectal elements to general or literary terms, he brings nourishment to the word). In this essay, Beccaria points out that, beyond lexicon, Pavese’s stylistic research reveals itself also in the difficult selection of rhythmic and intonative figures, in control over punctuation, in syntactic essentialness: choices that produce a text oscillating between prose and metrical forms, a prose tending to poetry.