Word: vittorini
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...CARNATION (244 pp.)-Elio Vittorini-New Directions...
...discussed the works of the men whom he considered outstanding in the movement: Pratolini Flaiano, Vittorini, Levi, Berto, Malaparte, Moravia, Pavese, and Marrota. He considers Vittorini, whose 1937 novel "In Sicily" was recently published in this country by New Directions, to be the most important of the group...
...throughout the year, most of them reflecting the bitterness and weariness of Italian life. Much-touted Alberto Moravia's The Woman of Rome was a sexy, glibly written story about a young prostitute that lacked entirely the large significance claimed for it. Stronger and better stuff was Elio Vittorini's In Sicily, a sad, smoldering look at Italian poverty and hopelessness under Mussolini. It came with a blessing from Ernest Hemingway, who had postponed his own long-awaited postwar novel to whip out a short one promised for the summer of 1950 under the marathon title, Across...
...Author Vittorini, who was a Fascist in his youth, wrote In Sicily in 1937, when he was in the process of becoming a Communist. That may explain the midsection rhetoric. Only a fine natural gift explains the rest-and the best-of his story...
...Vittorini partially redeems all this by a quiet ending: Silvestro and his mother mutely discover their buoying devotion to each other. After all, she says shyly, "it makes one happy to talk to one's son, after 15 years . . ." And Silvestro, who has rediscovered compassion, thereby rediscovers man's strength...