Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year
by Carlo Levi
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Book Summary Information
Author: Carlo LeviTranslator: Frances Frenaye
Introduction: Mark Rotella
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-01-10
ISBN: 0374530092
Number of pages: 296
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Book Reviews of Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year
Book Review: .........but he didn't stop the poverty
Summary: 5 Stars
In a pre-Marley world, a young Italian doctor and artist with socialist ideas was exiled for three years to a remote southern Italian village by Mussolini's Fascist party. While it's not entirely clear where his money came from, he was allowed to keep a dog, have visitors and talk with the villagers freely. Because the two local doctors amounted to little more than antiquated quacks, Carlo Levi was pushed into practicing medicine. The sentence required that he not leave the village and that he find his own quarters. A dozen other exiles lived in the village, but contact among them was limited as well. That's how a liberal Jewish intellectual from Turino came to live among the peasants, petit bourgeoisie, and envy-wracked country gentry of Gagliano village in the mountains of what is today Italy's Basilicata region. Villages here, in the 1930s, lived a life far from any government assistance. Even Christ stopped (it was said) at Eboli, a town at the northern edge of the poverty-stricken region. Levi writes brilliantly of life in the remote village---the discouraged priest, the Fascist mayor (who, though strict with the exiles, wants Levi's approval as a "man of culture"), the mayor's manipulative sister, the peasant women maids who worked for him---and the difficult lives they had, without any aid from the outside world. Levi paints a picture of a place tied to its past, with 19th century struggles between bandits (peasants) and the landowners only the last of the struggles. Outside occupiers had marched in and out for centuries, but for the most part, the peasants kept their heads down and worked in their malarial fields in the valley below. CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI evokes above all the world of the forgotten people of Italy, taxed, drafted into armies for wars they never understood, and then ignored. Rome gave them nothing, only sent tax collectors and imposed mayors who called useless meetings and gave fatuous speeches. But don't think that the peasants were unaware of the outside world. It was just that their ties with the wider world did not lie in Rome, but in the big city slums of America. A huge percent of the village men went off to America to labor, sent money and goods, and often never returned, leaving an equal number of women alone. The men who returned mostly plunged back into village life. When their foreign funds dried up, they became part of traditional life once more, not having changed dramatically in their foreign sojourn.
Levi writes of all this and a lot more. He created it on the basis of one year's stay, because he received an amnesty when Addis Ababa fell to Mussolini's army. You would have to use the word "lyrical" to describe the style. The inhabitants of Gagliano and surrounding villages are drawn vividly, the connections of peasants, village, nature, the saints, the church, the magical spirits, social class, and politics so well-knit that you absorb a "village study" better than most professional anthropologists' before you know it. This is a masterpiece. One of the best books I have read in a long time.
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