Christ Stopped at Eboli.

I’m starting to fall behind here, so this will be a quick writeup. Carlo Levi was a doctor and political activist in fascist Italy who repeatedly fell afoul of the Mussolini regime, and one of his sentences was to spend a year in exile in the very poor Lucania region of southern Italy. His book about that experience, Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year, is a memoir that doubles as a sociological treatise with a subtle air of protest at the existence and treatment of this Italian underclass (although the subtlety disappears in the last five pages, where Levi shifts voice from narrator to activist.) The title refers to the local saying that Christ stopped at the town of Eboli and never made it to the poorest villages of the hinterlands, where the people are more pagan than Christian and are treated as less than human by the various governing authorities of the region and of Italy.

It’s not quite a nonfiction novel because of the lack of any singular plot strand, but instead works as a series of anecdotes and observations of peasant life in grinding poverty and under various forms of oppression, from direct government action to government inaction on issues like the rampant malaria that affects the region. Levi takes the ideal path of the neutral, objective observer, so that the peasants and their stories come through rather than Levi’s judgment on their customs and superstitions. The stories range from heartbreaking (there are a lot of dead children and husbands who left for the New World and never returned) to humorous (the fatuous mayor is almost too absurd to be true), but I did find the absence of some narrative force or unanswered question made the reading slow, especially in the final third or so of the book.

Next up: I’ve already finished Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.