Among Women Only [Paperback]

Cesare Pavese (Author), D. D. Paige (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1997

Published just months before his suicide in 1950, this novel won Italy's prestigious Strega Prize and has gone on to become one of Cesare Pavese's (1908-1950) most popular novels and was filmed by Michelangelo Antonioni. A successful couturier returns to Turin, the city in which she grew up, at the end of WW II. Opening a salon of her own leads her into a nihilistic circle of young hedonists, including the charismatic Rosetta, whose tragic death forms the novel's climax. But Turin itself is at the heart of the novel, its pervading melancholy deftly rendered by a master craftsman. Extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meanings.""-Italo Calvino ""One of the few essential novelists of the mid-twentieth century.""-Susan Sontag

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Italian

About the Author

Cesare Pavese was the author of The Political Prisoner.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 198 pages
• Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers (June 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0720610303
• ISBN-13: 978-0720610307
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,810,979 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Like a Hemingway for grown-ups, July 23, 2000

By 

Manuel Haas - See all my reviews

This review is from: Among Women Only (Paperback)

This is the story of a successful businesswomen coming back to her native Turin to direct the establishment of a new fashion store. It's the time of carnival, shortly after the war. The independent protagonist is in stark contrast to other helpless women around her.

Pavese's style is influenced by Hemingway and Steinbeck, but the way he treats his subject matter strikes me as a lot more grown-up. There is no machismo, no false sentimentality. Although it is more than fifty years old, there is something very contemporary about the novel.

The book is pervaded by a grief which may foreshadow Pavese's suicide a few months after "Among Women Only" won him the highest literary awards in Italy.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great Italian writer foresees his future, August 23, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Among Women Only (Paperback)

This is a short novel of astonishing beauty, maybe the best of Cesare Pavese. Filmed by Lucchino Visconti it became one of the rare cases in which both film and book are masterpieces, and one enlightens the other. An extraordinary portrait of the "signorile" sophistication of Turin, Italy, and of the hardnesses of life, especially of women. The story strangely parallels, but for gender and time, that of the author himself.

3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a great world writer, February 19, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Among Women Only (Paperback)

I have read Among Women Only in Turkish and I liked it very much.He is also my favourite Turkish writer's-Tezer Özlü- favourite writer.If anybody would like to contact me,I am in [e-mail]