Word: eboli
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...nothing narcotic about the year's novels from Italy. The two best were by Alberto Moravia: Conjugal Love, which dealt with a nasty marriage conflict without becoming nasty, and The 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...
Italy's postwar literary comeback was sparked in 1945 by Carlo Levi, a stocky ex-physician who prefers to be known as a painter. His Christ Stopped at Eboli (TIME, May 5, 1947), a prizewinning bestseller, was a vivid picture of life in the starving south Italian town to which Levi was exiled by Mussolini in 1935. His second book, Of Fear and Freedom, a rambling philosophical essay on man's fate, was as diffuse and shapeless as Eboli was graceful and compact...
...scenes-Rome's open black market, the shooting of a Fascist informer by a partisan in broad daylight-read as though they had been planned as paintings, full of sensuous color and clear visual images. Here & there, The Watch has patches of writing as good as anything in Eboli. But its pace is slowed by irrelevant incidents and by tedious, pointless speeches on Italian politics. Few books have so sorely needed a firm editor...
...spacious that G.I.s drove up & down it in their jeeps. These are bits & pieces, some of them very good, but they cannot make a book and they do not begin to make a novel. At 48, Carlo Levi is still the middling painter who wrote Christ Stopped at Eboli...