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Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year

Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year
By Carlo Levi

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A true classic in southern Italian literature, Christ Stopped at Eboli is an account of the author’s year in exile in Lucania (now Basilicata) because of his staunch opposition to fascism. The famous title refers to the sentiment that the spread of Christianity stopped at a southern Italian village called Eboli and went no further south in Italy—leaving the rest of the peninsula poor, uncivilized, pagan peasants. Levi writes beautifully the story of southern Italy in 1935, remaining detached from his observations of the feudal landscape and residents left behind in the development of the north. This book is often credited with alerting the rest of Italy and the world to true conditions in the south. Christ Stopped at Eboli is a thought-provoking, haunting portrait of a time, a people, and a place that may be difficult to digest for southern Italians but well worth the effort of trying.

Product Description

It was to Lucania, a desolate land in southern Italy, that Carlo Levi—a doctor, painter, philosopher, and man of letters—was confined as a political prisoner because of his opposition to Italy’s Fascist government at the start of the Ethiopian war in 1935. While there, Levi reflected on the harsh landscape and its inhabitants, peasants who lived the same lives their ancestors had, constantly fearing black magic and the near presence of death. In so doing, Levi offered a starkly beautiful and moving account of a place and a people living outside the boundaries of progress and time.

Carlo Levi (1902–1975) was born in Turin, Italy. He was a writer, journalist, artist, and doctor, whose first documentary novel, Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945), became an international sensation and introduced the trend toward social realism in post-war Italian literature.
With his account of his sojourn in the southern Italian region of Basilicata, Carlo Levi undertook to show the reader the Italy usually left out of history and travel books. Now in its seventh decade, Christ Stopped at Eboli remains a classic of its kind—an indelible portrait of a place, its people, and the customs they have fashioned over time. Lewis Gannett (New York Herald Tribune) has praised the prose for its "gray El Greco beauty" and shrewd human insight. "Basilicata—and the rest of southern Italy, for that matter—has changed more in the past sixty years than it had in the previous six centuries," Mark Rotella writes in his introduction, but "Levi's 'story of a year' feels as real and alive today as when he wrote it."
"[Christ Stopped at Eboli] has been called in turn a diary, an album of sketches, a novelette, a sociological study and a political essay. It has more than a trait of each genre; yet it remains as hard to classify as every beautiful book, or as the man who wrote this one."—The New York Times Book Review
 
"A sensitive and gifted writer with a great sense of style . . . Perhaps the best thing in [Levi's] book is the detachment by which he avoids sentimentalizing the peasants and at the same time renders their undestroyed feelings for human values."—Alfred Kazin

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #50123 in Books
  • Published on: 2006-01-10
  • Released on: 2006-01-10
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 272 pages

Features

Editorial Reviews

Review
"A kind a gray El Greco beauty." --Lewis Gannett, New York Herald Tribune

"Has been called in turn a diary, an album of sketches, a novelette, a sociological study and a political essay. It has more than a trait of each genre; yet it remains as hard to classify as every beautiful book, or as the man who wrote this one." --The New York Times Book Review

"A sensitive and gifted writer with a great sense of style . . . Perhaps the best thing in [Levi's] book is the detachment by which he avoids sentimentalizing the peasants and at the same time renders their undestroyed feelings for human values." --Alfred Kazin
-- Review

Review

"[Levi is] a sensitive and gifted writer with a great sense of style." --Alfred Kazin

Language Notes
Text: English, Italian (translation)

Customer Reviews

A Book Painted with Words5
This brilliant book is an account of Carlo Levi's banishment to a remote village in southern Italy for his opposition to Fascism in 1935. The title may be a bit misleading: this book is not about an incarnation of the deity that alighted in a place called Eboli. Eboli, a town of no consequence to the action of the book, is, rather, the farthest south Christianity (read: civilization) got. Gagliano, the town in which Levi arrives to carry out his exile, is as far south from Eboli as Eboli is from Naples, and is the end of the road in more than one respect.

In Gagliano, Levi lives a somewhat enviable (for an exile, at least) existence painting, writing, and, as a doctor, administering to the sick and injured. But the book is not about Levi's good works among the peasants. Rather, it is a series of sublime sketches about a people so grim, so primitive, so impoverished, so imbued with superstition and pagan ritual (Gagliano has a village priest, but he's drunk most of the time) that they seem an alien species. Levi doesn't so much understand them as observe them and paint them with words.

Levi's artistic gifts extend to his descriptions, and phrases such as "Grassano...is a streak of white at the summit of a bare hill" make the book come alive. It is clear that Frances Frenaye, the translator, deserves no small credit in this respect. This is a haunting work, and one of the most memorable books I have ever enjoyed.

Southern Italy: A country within a country5
This a memoir of Carlo Levi`s experience as a political exile during the fascist regime, at the outset of the Abyssinian war. The setting is a remote village in Lucania, southern Italy, a region characterized by poverty, malaria, completely forgotten and neglected by the State. Levi's artistic sensitivity describes the people, the landscape, with an acute human feeling. This is the other side of Italy, the reverse of the rich, famous, well-developed North. After reading this book, it is easy to understand why so many Italians were tempted to emigrate to the American continent. Levi's ability to socialize and understand the peasant mentality is outstanding; it's a merit to his personality. The fact that he did not isolate himself from the people around the village, regardless of social and cultural level, enable him, after his realease, to write this book with a deep understanding of the social, political, religious, economical, and cultural problems of Southern Italy. The style is simple, direct, and elegant. Why Christ, why Eboli? the author only wants to say that the "civilized world" of Christianity has not reached this region of Italy, be it in Eboli or any other village of the South. An interesting book, written by someone whose main occupation in life was not be a writer. Levi was trained as a doctor, and as a "social doctor" he brush-stroked his thoughts into this memoir.

highly recommended5
Carlo Levi writes in his usual warm style and gives us a timeless lesson of how one can face hardship with dignity. This book, which is hard to classify, has been described as everything from a novel to a diary and a memoir. Either way, it is a unique, moving and poignant look into the era of when Fascists controlled Italy and the lives of the people within it. Levi's descriptions of the people of the hilltop village of Lucania, where he was exiled by the Fascists in the 1930s, are precise and heartwarming. His descriptions of the landscape makes one feel as if they are there. Carlo Levi has produced a true masterpiece.