The burning brand

In 1950, shortly after winning Italy's highest literary award, Cesare Pavese committed suicide. Shocked and bewildered, his friends sought an explanation. Some suggested that it was Pavese's disillusionment with Communism. Others believed it might have been his unhappy love affair with an American film star. The truth was revealed only when Pavese's private diaries were brought to light. For the diaries revealed a tormented man struggling to achieve an elusive emotional maturity consistent with a poet's sensibility. In this quest Pavese failed. In his life the threat of suicide was always implicit. Above all, and despite his extraordinarily powerful intellect, he was a man who sought, until the bitter end, for a "perfect love." His diaries reveal the succession of harrowing disappointments that he met along the way with a pitiless self-analysis, touching nerves which most of us cannot bear to have exposed. It is no accident that the Diaries were hailed on the continent as the finest literary journals since Gide.--From publisher description.