Berto, a Turin worker, knows in the jail where he has been confined an awkward country man, Talino, an impulsive person that has been accused of having set fire to a farmhouse fraudulently. Hardly gone out of the jail, Talino succeeds in convincing Berto, that is an experienced mechanic, to follow him in the country, to Monticello, away from the laws that rule the human society; where he could work with the tresher. Berto follows him unwillingly, because he suspects that this awkward farmer burrows inside himself a diabolic dark plain of his and he wants to use him. In fact Talino has invited him in the country to shield with him a possible revenge of that man to which he had burnt the shed. Arrived in the village, Berto is upset by the discovery of the country. The hay's odor, the sight of those hills shaped like udders, the family of Talino, his father, Vinverra, the muddy sisters, all surprises and fascinates him. But above all, Talino’s sister, Gisella, made of fruit, the less heifer one of everybody and that tidies her hair secretly. Only Gisella appears him different, of another race than that of the country. Berto starts to court her for a sense of stimulating sensuality that the same places emante and for solidarity with her. But Talino has had an incestuous relationships with his sister, and now he doesn't withstand the new reality of Gisella’s love for Berto; and in the day of the threshing, while people are all busy and congested from the sun and from the dust, while Gisella is handing something to drink to the mechanic and rejects her brother that looks her with two beast eyes, with a jump, Talino plants in Gisella’s neck the trident. The thud of the tresher marks, as in an orgiastic rite, the slow agony of the poor woman. The events are narrated by Berto as soon as they happen and with the technique of the internal monologue, that Pavese takes back from Cain, last heir of the American fiction.
An experimental novel between realism and symbolism
" Paesi tuoi is an experimental novel, in the sense of a verification of the whole stylistic intense activity of that years, and an anticipation of that mythical themes that haven’t the strength to reach the equilibrium between Realism and Symbolism, effected in the novels of the maturity later. Keeping in mind this double line, Paesi tuoi has to be seen in a right perspective, in comparison with the interest that it aroused in the years when it appeared, or better it has to be read in a direction that is the opposite of the Neoralism, in which the novel was cataloged with that typical and generous error of perspective belonging to the years that see the triumph of the engagement and the full harmony between literature and politicy. Its action was very successful in the intellectuals: appeared in the most awful years of Fascism, it was a book that pointed out a choice and a coherent proposal of renewal, that symptomatically departed from the language, but that Neoralism aspire to deeper senses, to a certain type of description of the reality that was not exhausted in Naturalism" (VENTURI).
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