The Leucothea Dialogues

Cesare Pavese's The Leucothea Dialogues is peopled with gods, centaurs, clouds, poets, hunters, snakes, and nymphs. These are the beings who spoke to him through the ancient plays and poems he read in primary school. Here they speak again in the twenty-seven dialogues that form the novel. Pavese calls mythology a "hothouse of symbols." His hothouse is liveliest at night, in the peculiar clarity of darkness. Pavese's characters are more than "characters," they play like the dreams of earliest childhood, the