The Craft of Living is mostly a set of literary notes, like Leopardi’s Zibaldone, with almost no mention of the history going on all around him. (Pavese’s lively letters, by contrast, are full of talk, gossip, and the quotidian; he comes across as a magisterial man of letters, an efficient manager, and a generous friend.) The diary is, instead, a document of a writer’s intellectual and emotional life, which you can see him process into material. It’s most interesting when Pavese tries to write his way out, simultaneously, of literary and life problems, which he carefully interweaves. “That one must live tragically, and not voluptuously, is proved by all I have suffered,” he wrote in April 1936, the day after Tina’s wedding. “The fault lies in daydreaming, the distant enemy of good art, and in my need to avoid responsibility, to feel without paying the price.” The “lesson,” he concludes, is to “build in art and life, banish voluptuousness from both, and exist tragically.”