Among Women Only

Had Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) not committed suicide, he undoubtedly would have been the greatest Italian novelist of the twentieth century. In his brief career, he wrote a number of outstanding novels and was a major factor in introducing American and British fiction to Italy, translating books by Dickens, Melville, Joyce, and Faulkner. He was arrested a number of times for anti-Fascist activities before the war. In 1950, unable to reconcile his literary life with the demands made upon him by society, he took his life. Among Women Only, published two years before Pavese's death, won Italy's highest literary honor, the Strega Prize. Considered to be one of the chief sources for post-war Italian realism, it captures the pervading melancholy and emptiness of a society caught up in decadence and hedonism. Clelia, a successful couturier, returns to her native Turin to supervise the opening of a salon in the city where she spent her youth in poverty. She is drawn into a circle of fashionable young people and a world of restaurants and casinos, artists' studios and parties. Amidst this crowd of people who are trying to escape the futility and boredom of their lives in a mindless search for pleasure, she meets the solitary figure of Rosetta, whose suicide at the end of the story tragically foreshadows Pavese's own.