Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year

It was to Lucania, a desolate land in southern Italy, that Carlo Levi--a doctor, painter, philosopher, and man of letters--was confined as a political prisoner because of his opposition to Italy's Fascist government at the start of the Ethiopian war in 1935. While there, Levi reflected on the harsh landscape and its inhabitants, peasants who lived the same lives their ancestors had, constantly fearing black magic and the near presence of death. In so doing, Levi offered a starkly beautiful and moving account of a place and a people living outside the boundaries of progress and time. Carlo Levi (1902-1975) was born in Turin, Italy. He was a writer, journalist, artist, and doctor, whose first documentary novel, Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945), became an international sensation and introduced the trend toward social realism in post-war Italian literature. With his account of his sojourn in the southern Italian region of Basilicata, Carlo Levi undertook to show the reader the Italy usually left out of history and travel books. Now in its seventh decade, Christ Stopped at Eboli remains a classic of its kind--an indelible portrait of a place, its people, and the customs they have fashioned over time. Lewis Gannett (New York Herald Tribune) has praised the prose for its gray El Greco beauty and shrewd human insight. Basilicata--and the rest of southern Italy, for that matter--has changed more in the past sixty years than it had in the previous six centuries, Mark Rotella writes in his introduction, but Levi's 'story of a year' feels as real and alive today as when he wrote it. Christ Stopped at Eboli] has been called in turn a diary, an album of sketches, a novelette, a sociological study and a political essay. It has more than a trait of each genre; yet it remains as hard to classify as every beautiful book, or as the man who wrote this one.--The New York Times Book Review A sensitive and gifted writer with a great sense of style . . . Perhaps the best thing in Levi's] book is the detachment by which he avoids sentimentalizing the peasants and at the same time renders their undestroyed feelings for human values.--Alfred Kazin