Christ Stopped at Eboli (Penguin Modern Classics)

I bought this incredible book for a friend whose Italian ancestry he celebrates every day...but I suspect he probably hasn't read this illuminating, humanistic and vivid novel of a part of Italy "that Christ forgot". This southern part of Italy was largely ignored by northern Italians & particularly by Mussolini's fascist government....but I found this wonderful novel transcends history & politics. HIGHLY recommend.

英語の勉強になります。当時の世相やイタリア国内の南北の違いなどがわかり興味深い内容です。

I bought this to read on a trip to Italy last week, which included a visit to Matera in (what is now called) the region of Basilicata. Levi writes about his 1935-6 exile in this region (called Lucania at the time), describing the bleak landscapes and the poor people he lived alongside. They had an expression - "We're not Christians. Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli" - which he used for the evocative title of his memoir. Eboli is a town to the northwest of Basilicata and here, 'Christian' meant 'human being', because they thought of themselves as being mere beasts, having been bypassed by morality, or civilisation. This view is made explicit in Levi's description of his housekeeper, who had a face "unrelated to man, but linked with the soil and its everlasting animal deities [with] cold sensuality, hidden irony [...] and an immense passive power" [p105]. The visceral link to the earth and the (other) beasts is exactly invoked in a passage describing the visit of "the pig doctor", who comes to castrate the young sows of the village (in order to make them fatter and more tender to eat). The operation is described with harrowing exactness ("blood spurted out over the surrounding mud and snow [...] yard upon yard of intestine emerged from the wound, rose, purple and grey" [p181]), and also the way in which the sows' owners (all women) were attached to their beasts, and trembled with fear for their animals. Elsewhere, he sees a lame man blowing into the body of a dead goat (in order to peel off the skin), and is struck by the sense of metamorphosis as the man's breath leaves his body and enters that of the animal, as if he was changing into a beast. His sister visits him from Turin via Matera and she describes that town as an embodiment of Dante's Inferno as she follows the path down past the caves populated by men, women, children and animals with "a few pieces of miserable furniture [...] and some ragged clothes hanging up to dry" [p87], never having seen such a picture of abject poverty in her life. Finally, he writes vividly of the poverty and despair shared between the peasants and the so-called gentry, whose life he describes as a "dust-covered and uninteresting skein of self-interest, low-grade passion, boredom, greedy impotence, and poverty" [p65]. The description of Matera makes uncomfortable reading for a tourist visiting that town today - indeed, Levi's book (which includes a polemic on how to solve "the problems of the South") was instrumental in persuading the government to try and improve the lot of its inhabitants. The book tells a story about an unpleasant world, but the author's powers of description (which reminded me of those of Laurie Lee in his books about Spain in the mid-20th century) bring it to life in an elegant and memorable fashion. Recommended.

Love the book

This moving memoir describes Carlo Levi's time as a political prisoner in 1935-1936 during the Mussolini fascist regime in Italy. His beautiful writing depicts his daily routines while he served his term in the most remote and inaccessible areas of the Basilicata region. if you are interested in rural Italy during this time period, it is a portrait of the people of this region. The cave dwellers of Matera are mentioned, and Levi's book, which was published in 1945, was instrumental in bringing awareness of their terrible living conditions to the attention of the new government, which began relocating the people to healthier areas. One of the best books I have ever read on Italian history. It has never been out of print since its publication.