Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year (FSG Classics) - Softcover

Levi, Carlo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374530092 ISBN 13: 9780374530099

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From the Back Cover

A sensitive and gifted writer with a great sense of style.... Perhaps the best thing in his 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, New York Herald Tribune Book Review

The present translation by Frances Frenaye suggests that Levi is a great prose stylist, as well as brilliant observer of human life and a wise and patient diagnostician of our condition. --New Republic

A kind of gray El Greco beauty.... It is a long time since any book has come out of Italy with such an individual accent, such a richness of texture. --Lewis Gannett, New York Herald Tribune

Levi writes with sympathy and insight.... Hailed by Italian critics as one of their most promising contemporary writers, he has proved his competence by making a readable and interesting book out of grim and forbidding material. --Saturday Review of Literature

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. --New York Times Book Review

About the Author

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0374530092
• ISBN 13: 9780374530099
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304