Among Women Only, by Cesare Pavese (Peter Owen, £11.50 in UK)

A strong (and, no doubt, expertly exploited) posthumous cult grew up around Pavese in the 1960s, fuelled partly by the rather mysterious circumstances of his suicide in 1950. His journals were then compared with Kierkegaard's and his novels were found to fit exactly into the mood of chic despair embodied in Antonioni's films. Like his other books, Among Women "Only is short, elegantly amoral and disillusioned in the postwar Italian mode, well tailored and rather thin. It might serve Pavese's reputation better if his admirers stopped making hyperbolic claims for him; the work simply has not the weight to bear them out.