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

A tight copy-" 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." 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 a 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 and 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