Product Description

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1475059 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

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

Language Notes
Text: English, Italian (translation)

From the Back Cover
A sensitive and gifted writer with a great sense of style.... Perhaps the best thing in his 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, New York Herald Tribune Book Review

The present translation by Frances Frenaye suggests that Levi is a great prose stylist, as well as brilliant observer of human life and a wise and patient diagnostician of our condition. --New Republic

A kind of gray El Greco beauty.... It is a long time since any book has come out of Italy with such an individual accent, such a richness of texture. --Lewis Gannett, New York Herald Tribune

Levi writes with sympathy and insight.... Hailed by Italian critics as one of their most promising contemporary writers, he has proved his competence by making a readable and interesting book out of grim and forbidding material. --Saturday Review of Literature

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. --New York Times Book Review

Customer Reviews

A Book Painted with Words
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 country
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 recommended
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.