Praise
Pavese, to me, is a constant source of inspiration.
— Jhumpa Lahiri
There can be no excuse for not reading Pavese, one of the few essential novelists of the mid-twentieth century.
— Susan Sontag
This is how writers in our ever-worsening world should write.
— Saul Bellow
Pavese's nine short novels make up the most dense, dramatic and homogeneous narrative cycle of modern Italy, and are also . . . the richest in representing social ambiances, the human comedy, the chronicle of a society. But above all they are works of an extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meanings . . . Each one of Pavese's novels revolves around a hidden theme, something unsaid which is the real thing he wants to say
— Italo Calvino
There is something about Pavese . . . that is insinuating, haunting and lyrically pervasive.
— The New York Times Book Review
One of the word's great creative depressives.
— Tim Parks, The Daily Telegraph
Cesare Pavese is one of those singular, disruptive poets, like Blake or Lawrence, who go against the grain—or the flow—of their culture, and for whom precedents would be as hard to find as successors . . . His marvellously peopled poems not only document the time—what Calvino called 'the Pavese era'—but also bear witness to a unique and restless intelligence.
— Jamie McKendric, The Guardian