Word: vittorini
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Dates: during 1949-1949
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...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...
...SICILY (163 pp.)-Elio Vittorini-New Directions...
...this point, In Sicily is an excellent novel about the same kind of simple and appealing people that Ignazio Silone (Bread and Wine, The Seed Beneath the Snow) writes about-all done in a clipped Hemingwayesque style. But just about midway, Novelist Vittorini goes off on a wild-swinging tear into symbolism which is part sentimentality, part hallucination. His characters begin to chant lugubrious dirges about the "world's outrages" that sound as if they had been written by William Saroyan with an ice pack on his head...
...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...