In the south of Italy, between Apulia and Calabria, lies a land that is barren, desolate, and malarial, where the peasants live out their existence in poverty and in the presence of death. It was here in primitive Lucania, at the start of the Ethiopian war in 1935, that Carlo Levi, doctor, painter, philosopher, and man of letters, was confined as a political prisoner because of his uncompromising opposition to Fascism. Christ Stopped at Eboli is Levi's classic, starkly beautiful account of a place beyond hope and a people abandoned by history, living outside the boundaries of progress and time.
Translated from the Italian by Frances Frenaye
Editorial Reviews
"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.
