The protagonist-narrator is a foundling, grown in the Langhe and raised by a family of farmers that worked the lands of the Gaminella, a farm near the Belbo. And here the autobiographic character of this novel is until too much evident. Anguilla, the protagonist is called in that way, has returned from America. Where he has made a fortune, and reenters to his town in the Langhe, after the war is ended.
With this expedient Pavese entirely renounces to every politic ideality in the novel. In the opening of the book immediately the disappointed psychology and the pessimism of the narrator appears:
I travelled all over the world to know that all the meats are good and are equivalent, but it is for this reason that one is tired and tries to root, to posses land and country, because his meat will worth and last a little bit more that a commune change of season.
It is not that the return of Anguilla flushes of defeat, on the contrary of the awareness that growing means to go away. Anguilla now lodges at the Albergo dell’Angelo and smiles if some farmers want to sell him lands or give him a wife, thinking touched to his life of miserable foundling, raised by Padrino e Virgilia, that every month received a scudo from the hospital of Alexandria for him; the shore of the hazels, the girls and the goat.
Nuto: historian of the happened events
But of the few people he knew in that period, nobody has almost remained: only Nuto, his old friend, that at that time was a performer of clarinet in all the ball at upper-tier box of Belbo’s valley, and that now has become a carpenter worried of his job only; he welcomes Anguilla festively and he accompanies him in his peregrinations in the places of his infancy and of the past. For the occasion Nuto is also a historian of the happened events, he tells the war, of the living people and of the dead people, of the Resistance. To Nuto, that wants to give reason of everything and that sustains that the world is bad and it is necessary to remake, Pavese entrusts his ideas on the anxiety of social, moral and political renewal of the society.
The war has passed on the hills, and also the Resistance, but still there is the blackest poverty for the damned people that throw the life with their teeth. In fact in the farmhouse where Anguilla was picked up, when he was still a small , by Padrino and Virgilia, now Valino lives, a poor farmer that bashes up his wife in the excesses of anger and poverty, and his poor crippled child, Cinto, lives with him too, that later makes friend with Anguilla. Then, Nuto tells, the war and the Resistance have not changed anything for the poor people of the country, so many dead people have fought in vain; on the contrary the gentlemen, after the war, have got on their high horse, the priest thunders anathemas from the pulpit against the revolutionaries, and the trials are prepared for the partisans.
This uneasiness of his earth lets also remember to Anguilla the American California, barbaric and wild land, but also rich of technological progress and of cars.
But the Langa is not less uneasy than America, as Nuto lets him know, talking about the dead people, the Resistance, the damned people that still fight with the poverty, that Nuto that in youth was a funster and a performer of clarinet, but that know doesn't play anymore, but that continually has on the mouth impassioned speech of social justice and of solidarity. Anguilla, however, is deluded that on the hills the time doesn't pass and he has started to see Cinto, the boy of Valino that lives in the farmhouse of his infancy, almost to establish an ideal interview with the him same of once, to cross the roads of the memory, for nostalgia of his infancy, almost identifying himself with him.
But the reality always intervenes to lacerate the veil of the memory, because the past is lost forever; of the farm of theMora, of that life of us doesn't remain anything. The people of the distant friendship have disappeared, the same places have changed, to the memory of the bonfires, that the emigrant had brought in his soul during his American exile, and that served to the farmers of the Langhe to wake the lands, other bonfires are now superimposed.
The three girls of the Mora, the mistresses he loved and dreamed in a distant time, they came to a bad end: a bad married, another dead for abortion and Santina, the youngest - the dear child since that time - killed by the partisan and then burnt as a fascist spy. The land has also wanted its tribute of blood and death; in fact also Valino, pushed by his innate folly and by the desperation to live, destroys his house, family and beasts and him same with the fire, after having tried to call and to kill Cinto too, which, by now affectionated to Anguilla, is entrusted to Nuto by him, because he will have to learn the work of carpenter in the shop.