El oficio de vivir

Started on October 6, 1935 during his imprisonment for political reasons, this diary accompanied Cesare Pavese until August 18, 1950, nine days before his death, and gradually became the place to trust thoughts about the universe. of the writer and of the man. Bitter, ironic, seldom serene, it offers the reader a meditation on life, loneliness, memories and art conducted with enormous intellectual rigor. At the same time, page by page, he records his incessant poetic-literary development, the evolution, in short, of a personal job of living. Pavese left a living testament that becomes even greater over time and that, as the translator and poet Ángel Crespo superbly described, "has the virtue of the great classics, that is, converting an intimate existence into something universal, since the life that Pavese writes in The Office of Living is that of contemporary man, that of the 20th century, tied to doubts and permanent anguish, a man who asks all the time: but what are we doing here?". One of the great literary and intellectual figures of the first half of the century, his career as a novelist, poet and critic contributed decisively to defining both the culture of the time and that of successive generations, among whom the newspaper in the one that distilled a unique way of understanding and reflecting on the world.