Christ Stopped at Eboli (Penguin Modern Classics): Written by Carlo Levi, 2000 Edition, (New Ed) Publisher: Penguin Classics [Paperback]

Great book, beautifully written.

Marvellous book. Read it years ago but wanted a copy.

A masterpiece

Levi’s account of the year he spent at Aliano (changed to Gagliano in the text) in 1935-36 lives up to its reputation as one of the classic memoirs of the twentieth century. As a political prisoner Levi was confined to this tiny hilltop town in Lucania (Basilicata) so he got to know its inhabitants extremely well. Levi was inquisitive and sympathetic by nature, and his medical training came as a blessing to these wretchedly poor people. He describes their lives, relationships, and customs with astonishing clarity and compassion but without sentimentality. Constantly he tries to explain why the region is so impoverished. Most of his memoir’s 25 chapters are built around individual encounters, events or communal festivities marking the passing of the seasons. Some chapters, above all his sister’s devastating account of the squalor of Matera, and Levi’s futile journey to try to save a dying farmer two hours’ journey from Aliano, are particularly impressive, but the whole book has a quality of immediacy, poignancy and charm that raises it to the level of a masterpiece. This archaic and isolated society has gone for ever, and we owe a huge debt to Levi for recording it in such absorbing and moving detail before it disappeared after the war. Appropriately the author, who died in 1975, lies buried in the town he immortalised.

This book by the Italian doctor and painter Carlo Levi, 1902-75, was published in Italy in 1945, just a decade after the events that it describes. This 1947 English translation is by Frances Frenaye, 1908-96.The author is unrelated to the younger and more famous novelist and essayist Primo Levi, 1919-87. However both were Jews from Turin, Primo Levi was an industrialist chemist and Carlo Levi qualified as a doctor but did not practice. Both were committed anti-Fascists and whilst Primo Levi was later sent to Auschwitz, in 1935 Carlo Levi was exiled to the remote and malaria-ridden Southern region of Lucania. This book is an account of this experience at a time when Mussolini was sending troops into Abyssinia.The account is set in Grassano and Gagliano [in reality Aliano], two small impoverished towns where the peasants’ exploitation by absentee landlords and Northern politicians has created a lifestyle that is backbreaking and hopeless. Levi is confined to the limits of Gagliano and cannot practice medicine officially despite heartrending requests from the local people.As a result of mismanagement of the land and political indifference to the plight of the population, malaria is rife and minor illnesses are often fatal due to lack of effective doctors, basic facilities and lack of drugs. Jaundice, ‘rainbow sickness’, is endemic, the peasants believing that when the rainbow falls on clothes hung out to dry, the washing will be impregnated with its spectrum and the owners will fall ill with the disease. During the year that Levi spends there the towns are transformed into a giant bog by the incessant rain, baked by an unrelenting sun, buffeted by icy winds and buried in snow.Levi becomes an attraction to the local population, a source of wonder to the peasants whose illnesses he [and luck] can sometimes cure, a romantic dream for unmarried women and a link to the educated wider world for the Fascist Mayor and his manipulative wife. All of the characters are presented in a very skilful and holistic manner, becoming old ‘friends’ as they reappear in the narrative.Levi is a master of description, whether it is of the machinations and intrigues of politics, Italian history, the myths and beliefs of Southern Italy, political and social differences between the North and South, public health policies [and their absence] and - in one gruesome scene - high throughput veterinary surgery. His sympathy is with his faithful dog, Barone, and with the peasantry, and more than once he is on the point of leading the latter against the indifferent mayor, only to realise that they will end up paying a much greater price than he.It was fascinating to learn about ‘Americanos’, locals who had lived in the US before returning to the region – only to have their hard-earned savings taken by the local and central administrations, In nearby Materna, most of the 20,000 inhabitants live in single rooms - adults, children, babies and animals. Children were ‘everywhere, in the dust and heat, amid the flies, stark naked or clothed in rags: I have never in all my life seen such a picture of poverty’.Despite their poverty, the locals are incredibly hospitable to outsiders, possess a fatalistic sense of humour and maintain a tradition of personal and family honour. At the individual level they can be ruthless and bloody-minded. Levi believes that their real oppressors are not central/regional government officials but the self-satisfied middle-classes, who expropriated nationalist language and symbols to precipitate the rise of Fascism.Levi sees similarities between his exile and the situation of downtrodden locals whom the politicians in Rome have abandoned as primitive and inferior. He understands, rather than patronises, his neighbours’ ignorance, and is impressed where they have developed skills despite their oppression, and shows his understanding of their centuries’ long abject maltreatment. At the end of the memoir he offers a critique of the political action needed to reverse their decline.Throughout this enthralling memoire/autobiography/social history Levi’s poetic vision burns bright.