Customer Reviews

Among Women Only

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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.

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.

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 vessiz@hotmail.com

This book was published in Italy in 1949. It's set in Turin, a few years after the end of World War II. After having left 17 years earlier as a teenager to make her way in the world, the narrator returns to establish a local branch for her employer, a large and fashionable Roman couturier. In Turin her name is known, and her professional status allows her to mix with the moneyed class there. But she discovers that though she used to admire and envy them from afar, up close they're aimless and unaware. And while they at least live among their own kind, she fits in neither with them nor with those she came from.

She finds that the trappings of success, or even the striving for them, no longer give her life meaning. She wonders if she can go on, feeling "an utter and complete disgust with living, with everything and everyone, with time itself which goes so fast and yet never seems to pass." Earlier in the novel, she'd already expressed a cynical view of the relations between men and women and rejected having a family. She feels close to no one, nor does she have any religious feeling.

Life, however, proceeds. She enjoys a happy interlude, momentarily forgetting her problems. Toward the novel's end, she tries fitfully to reach out and help a sensitive young upper-class woman who's just beginning adult life. Like her, the woman is searching for meaning, but unlike her has been indulged and can't earn her own living.

As with Pavese's final novel, The Moon and the Bonfire, a successful, parentless narrator returns home after leaving at a young age. Events are presented in a very spare style, in short scenes that take place cinematically, visually. There's a younger character against whom the narrator is measured, an older character who provides a link to the world the narrator has entered, and in the later pages the story's resolution moves away from the narrator. Among Women Only, however, doesn't delve as deeply into the past, the narrator's memory and the melancholy passing of time, and doesn't spend as much time developing other characters. Though the narrator in it is much more alienated by her return than the male protagonist in Bonfire, for me it wasn't as haunting.

In Bonfire, the symbolism came from nature. In Among Women Only, symbolism can be found in the various settings: the fashionable shop an architect is furnishing with modern furniture plus bits and pieces scavenged from old palaces. The posh hotel where the narrator stays. The well-appointed but stuffy or lonely apartments where the wealthy reside, the cafes and dance halls where they take their pleasure, and the traditional, cozy home where the younger woman lives. The disordered studio and theater where the younger, bohemian characters gather. And the gritty shops and bars where the poorer tradespeople live.

There were some interesting passages with characters rooted firmly in old values, such as a aging patrician who lamented the passing of old certainties, whose highest value was working for one's family, and who thought young people had lost their culture and identity and had "all the vices of the old without the experience." An elderly craftsman used to working in palaces who refused to spend time on modern furniture and retreated into the bastion of his shop. And an elderly grandmother who'd risen into the upper class after a full and eventful life, and who still found curiosity in living.

A criticism of the book would be that, having raised the issue of life's meaning for the main character, the author set it aside and provided no resolution for her, nor surprisingly little change in her behavior resulting from her new awareness.

this is a brilliant book about a woman who is very ambitious and becomes indifferent to the fate of others. She also becomes lonely and quite isolated, but she continues her career.