Memoir: Il mestiere di vivere

Overview
"Il mestiere di vivere" gathers Cesare Pavese's private diary entries written between the mid-1930s and 1950. The volume reads as a long, intermittent confession and a manual of interior survival: short dated notes, aphorisms, memories, and programmatic sentences that map a life lived under the pressure of solitude, work, and an unremitting search for meaning. The title, literally "the craft of living", frames daily existence as a craft to be learned and practiced rather than as a drama to be solved.

Form and Tone
Entries vary from terse maxims to lyrical paragraphs; the prose often slips into the concentrated, poetic register Pavese cultivated in his verse and fiction. The diction is spare, sometimes bleak, and marked by recurring motifs, silence, distance, habit, and the weather of the Piedmont countryside. Intimacy is paradoxical: the notebook feels like a confidant, yet the voice remains observant and disciplined, as if recording were itself a means to resist despair.

Main Themes
Solitude and the imminence of death dominate the pages, together with a relentless self-scrutiny. Work, above all the work of writing and translating, is treated as both refuge and obligation, a daily discipline that gives shape to time. Memory and the country landscape anchor a sense of identity; recollections of childhood and rural scenes recur as stabilizing images. Love and sexual longing appear in recurrent, often ambivalent portraits of women and relationships, where desire coexists with fear of engulfment and an inability to settle into lasting bonds.

Intellectual Life and Influences
The diary is also a record of reading and intellectual labor. Pavese's engagement with American literature, classical Italian culture, and contemporary politics surfaces continuously: translations, notes on books, and brief critical judgments intersperse private reflection. The entries show a writer negotiating the literary vocation under conditions of political constraint and cultural exchange, often measuring his impulses against the rigors of craft and the habits that sustain creative work.

Mood and Legacy
A pervasive melancholia and a stoic attention to detail make the book haunting, especially given Pavese's suicide shortly after the diaries' end. There is an ethical insistence on constancy, the idea that life is a series of tasks to be met with fidelity. The diary has influenced generations as a model of how daily writing can be an instrument of self-knowledge and of moral survival. Its fragments remain a powerful testimony to a sensibility that combined classical restraint with painful modern loneliness.