A review by gh7
Conversations in Sicily by Elio Vittorini
4.0
This was written and published during the fascist era and therefore had to get by the stringent punitive censorship of the time. The irony is the book owes its form and much of its beauty to the imperative of eluding censorship. It wouldn't have been written in this form if not for censorship. A rare case of censorship doing the artist a massive favour. Compelling him to innovate and mask meaning with artful subtlety.
Because of the hugely overshadowing Nazi death camps history has turned into little more than a footnote what Mussolini did in Abyssinia in 1935. When, among other Italian atrocities, the Italian air force sprayed native villages with mustard gas. This book's starting point is probably the deep shame and disgust any decent human being would feel at this cowardly act done in the name of his country. It begins with the line, "That winter I was in the grip of abstract furies. I won't be more specific."
The narrator, on the spur of the moment, decides to visit his mother in Sicily who he hasn't seen for fourteen years. Elio Vittorini has a musical ear and his prose is incantatory with its beautiful refined repetitive rhythms. The journey undertaken by the narrator is as much a journey back in time as through space. His conversations like a dialogue with the deepest part of his being as well as with the land of his birth.
Unfortunately for me the beautiful mysterious spell it was casting fizzled out a bit in the last third when the narrator gets drunk and overly maudlin and then has a conversation with his dead brother. Nevertheless, a magical innovative book which artfully not only overcomes the obstacle of censorship but uses censorship as a kind of forge in which to craft the work.
Because of the hugely overshadowing Nazi death camps history has turned into little more than a footnote what Mussolini did in Abyssinia in 1935. When, among other Italian atrocities, the Italian air force sprayed native villages with mustard gas. This book's starting point is probably the deep shame and disgust any decent human being would feel at this cowardly act done in the name of his country. It begins with the line, "That winter I was in the grip of abstract furies. I won't be more specific."
The narrator, on the spur of the moment, decides to visit his mother in Sicily who he hasn't seen for fourteen years. Elio Vittorini has a musical ear and his prose is incantatory with its beautiful refined repetitive rhythms. The journey undertaken by the narrator is as much a journey back in time as through space. His conversations like a dialogue with the deepest part of his being as well as with the land of his birth.
Unfortunately for me the beautiful mysterious spell it was casting fizzled out a bit in the last third when the narrator gets drunk and overly maudlin and then has a conversation with his dead brother. Nevertheless, a magical innovative book which artfully not only overcomes the obstacle of censorship but uses censorship as a kind of forge in which to craft the work.