Word: brigands
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Editor Arabel Porter's prize catch is a chapter from an unfinished novel by Michael Seide. a Brooklyn story writer with a rare feeling for the depression years. Some other standout pieces: a story about an Italian P.W. in a U.S. hospital, by Giuseppe (The Brigand) Berto; a grisly novelette about a tubercular who marries to escape a domineering mama, by the 21-year-old French prodigy, Jean-Baptiste Rossi; a lively critical comparison of Mickey Spillane and Georges Simenon by Charles Rolo. If half the 110,000 copies of New World Writing are sold, the publishers will break...
...Captain Brassbound's Conversion," the story of how a woman converts a purposeless brigand into a purposeful one, is supposedly dominated by the female lead, Cicely Wayneflete. As played by Ann Revere this character is weak, inconsistent, and incapable of forcing the last act climax that Shaw envisioned. According to the script she is a woman who is to have her own way, and yet the awe with which her presence is greeted at the end of the first act hardly seems merited. One indeed wonders why her every word is met with instantaneous servility...
...Conformist, the case history of a weakling whose weakness made him a Fascist. Carlo Levi (Christ Stopped at Eboli) came a cropper with The Watch, a sympathetic but unfocused look at his postwar land, but Giuseppe Berto followed an uneven first novel (The Sky Is Red) with The Brigand, the story of an Italian Robin Hood which exposed the despair of ordinary people with a fine mixture of candor and sympathy...
Bloodied Hands. After that, The Brigand moves to a relentless climax. Michele incites acts of violence against landowners, sets fire to their homes, and leads a pathetic peasant march to divide the big estates. He is driven to the hills as an outlaw, finally cornered and killed. Nino looks on helplessly, convinced that his friend is a victim of injustice, but realizing, too, that he was not the man to lead the peasants: "You could not carry justice to mankind with hands that were befouled with so much blood...
Author Berto could easily have spoiled his book by sentimentalizing Michele into a hero of the oppressed, or by treating him merely as a vicious criminal. Instead, he has looked at him steadily with profound sympathy but also with implicit disapproval. The Brigand, as a social document, may help explain why many Italians have snapped at the Communist bait. As a novel, it is an honest and affecting picture of human beings in travail...