Summer books: from Pavese to Garcia Marquez, the great classics

Returning to the classics, there are at least three titles that recall summer. The first is therefore ‘La bella estate’ by Pavese. Published for the first time in 1949 by Einaudi, it is actually a triptych of stories which includes, in addition to ‘La bella estate’, ‘The devil on the hills’ and ‘Tra donne sole’. In a Turin summer, Pavese writes, the “story of a virginity that defends itself” takes place. In other words, Pavese’s is the story of an inevitable loss of innocence. It is no coincidence, in fact, that against the backdrop of a gray and twilight Turin, the maturation of a teenager unfolds: the protagonist, Ginia, falls in love with a young painter by whom, after internal resistance and remorse, she allows herself to be seduced.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1982, talks about summer and the sentimental adventures that can take place in this season. In ‘See you in August’ – released in 2024, ten years after the death of the author of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ – Marquez offers his readers a tribute to femininity, a story of freedom and desire that does not dry up with age or even with marital love. And in fact, on a Caribbean island, Ana Magdalena will meet a man who, in one night of transgression, will change her life forever. Change, after all, is also the underlying theme of the second novel written by Elsa Morante after ‘Menzogna e sortilegio’, a ‘must’ for those who want to know its poetics. ‘Arturo’s Island’, a book that won the Strega prize in 1957, tells the story of Arturo, a boy who lives on the island of Procida. Little by little, moving freely between beaches and cliffs, Arturo will also mature through meetings and his relationship with his father. Relationships that will make him become an adult. Another novel to rediscover set in summer is ‘I’m not afraid’ by Niccolò Ammaniti. Written in 2001, and brought to the big screen by Gabriele Salvatores, the book is punctuated by various elements with an Augustan flavour. Einaudi who launched it, presents it with a few phrases that characterize it well: “The hottest summer of the century, four houses lost in the corn. The adults are stuck in the house. Six children, on their bicycles, venture into the scorching and abandoned countryside. In the midst of that sea of ​​ears there is a scary secret, which will change the life of one of them forever”. (by Carlo Roma)