In 1935, Carlo Levi is exiled to the south of Italy to a remote and rural small town as a political prisoner. He is punished for his anti-fascist views and especially for his activism against the war against Ethiopia. He is a doctor by trade, an artist by spirit, and an intellectual by design, and so in the small town he stands out on all three fronts. When he first gets there, he realizes immediately that the inherited medical practice of the town’s only doctor is ill-suited to meet the needs of the people — specifically he realizes within a few moments of talking with the doctor that he’s a complete quack. As a result he becomes enmeshed within the town, and more or less becomes one of them.
But he’s the consummate outsider as well. He spends long sections of this memoir tracing his sense of Italian cultural history and political stratification and better understands the reality behind the socialism he’s fighting for.
Ultimately this is a very interesting and well-written memoir about exile. I have a particular fascination with exile, especially in Italian settings — I think of Dante exiled, I think of Romeo exiled — and I wonder what it must mean for someone so connected to a specific homeland, especially in a country only so recently unified.
It’s also interesting how very similar the biography of Carlo Levi is to Primo Levi, though they apparently were not related. Also, this is an interesting political memoir, because while the danger and consequence is still strong, it doesn’t have quite the menace of a Nazi/WWII or Communist exile/political prisoner story.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Christ-Stopped-Eboli-Story-Classics/dp/0374530092/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3RJU17ISP7PR3&keywords=christ+stopped+at+eboli+carlo+levi&qid=1551269903&s=gateway&sprefix=christ+stopped%2Caps%2C224&sr=8-1)