"Christ Stopped at Eboli"
This is a remarkable book that I keep thinking about. The author is Carlo Levi, whose Italian I can’t read, so I especially want to compliment the translation by Frances Frenaye.
The title is kind of a joke, with reference to the insistence that God is everywhere. “Everywhere” would have to include the humble town of Eboli, from where Christ strayed no further.
I find the first sentence striking:
“Many years have gone by, years of war and of what men call History.”
The title refers to villages beyond Eboli, an otherwise insignificant town in impoverished southern Italy. The idea is that these places are untouched by Christ, who stopped short at Eboli and went no further. In a sense, as the narrator often says, the inhabitants cannot even be called human. History happens elsewhere, to men.
The local expression of Christianity is reduced to bare minimums of local custom, perhaps with reference to particular saints or the Madonna. The churches are in states of disrepair and command little devotion. The point of the title is that notwithstanding the status of Catholicism as for all practical purposes as a state religion, Christ, the Jesus of love and charity, is nowhere to be found.
The extreme poverty is only one factor. The other is that the villages are utterly isolated from any meaningful connection with the wider world, even to the rest of Italy. The narrator/author Carlo Levi was an anti-fascist artist condemned by Mussolini to internal exile in two of these barren, southern villages .
The topography is important to the story. The villages in question are situated in rocky mountainous areas, threaded with ravines, completely denuded of vegetation. What isn’t rock is dust. Mosquitoes, flies, and poisonous snakes are everywhere. The ground is mostly clay. Malaria is omnipresent. It’s Hell. To escape, one of the men seeks military service in Mussolini’s imperialist adventure in Abyssinia (today, Ethiopia).
The narrator is restricted to the city limits, under the watchful eyes of local authorities, who have little else to do. The town contains a few other political prisoners, but they are not allowed to converse with each other. Even so, the doctor is a local curiosity and celebrity as a northerner and a physician. He had not ever practiced medicine, but he is drawn into it by the locals, who lack viable alternative sources of medical care.
The peasants troop off before the sun comes up to remote fields to work their crops. Their incomes are ground down to bare survival levels. The depredations of landlords and the tax collector condemn them to destitution. For them, there is a continuum from science to magic, with not much science.
Members of the other class in the village are gentry who idle most of the day in the town square, embroiled in gossip and petty feuds. The area is dominated by fascists, but nobody is particularly interested in politics, except as a means to local authority. To the peasants, politics is completely irrelevant, the plaything of men in Rome. You get a vivid sense of how remote politics can be to those consumed with the needs of daily survival, or to those confined by social isolation. The only thing moving the peasants to a near revolt is a commandment from on high that, after many months, the doctor will no longer be permitted to practice medicine, though for lack of supplies or instruments, there is little he is ever able to do.
Even though the narrator is an anti-fascist important enough to have been sent into exile, he is well-treated, even honored, by the townspeople. To the peasants he is a fancy northerner. To the gentry, he is somebody from whom respect is sought. His politics are never discussed. Nobody is interested.
There was an excellent Italian movie made of the novel around 1980 I saw on a big screen at the time (then read the novel). I happen to be in grad school at the time and studied the brutal oppression and destruction of southern Italy in the 15th through the 17th centuries. The movie conveys the burden on people of living all those centuries of "history". Hard-hitting.
I was moved to read this novel by H. Stuart Hughes' survey of 20th century Italian Jewish novelists, Prisoners of Hope: The Silver Age of the Italian Jews, 1924–1974 which also covered work by Italo Svevo, Alberto Moravia, Primo Levi, Natalia Ginzburg and Giorgio Bassani. Of these, the two whom I found consistently compelling were Ginzburg and Primo Levi. I think in particular of Ginzburg's seemingly artless novel of wartime conditions under Fascism, A Light For Fools, also published as All Our Yesterdays; and Levi's memoir of his odyssey from Auschwitz to his Turin home, published as The Truce and The Reawakening. But both authors published a number of engaging works, fiction and non-ficition alike.
What I have sometimes recalled from Christ Stopped At Eboli is his description of a street scene played out whenever two of the gentry meet: "What did you have for dinner [last night]?" Might it have been a bid to one-up the interlocutor? I'd have to reread it.
My own favorite readings dealing with extreme proverty in southern Italy are the Sicilian novels and especially the stories of the later 19th century writer Giovanni Verga. Little Novels Of Sicily, translated by D. H. Lawrence, is a fine sampling. (I found Lawrence's translation of Verga's novel Mastro-don Gesualdo less successful than Giovanni Cecchetti's.) Verga, an exponent of Verismo, wrote the story that was the basis of Mascagni's one act verismo opera Cavalleria Rusticana.