Review of Carlo Levi's "Christ Stopped at Eboli"

This book was recommended to me probably eight years ago by a delightful old woman who worked with me by the name of Eleanor Jordan. I’d never heard of the book before, and didn’t think much of it for several years. One day, I saw it while browsing, picked it up, and just recently decided to read it, intermittently thinking of Eleanor. The title combined with the brief content summary she provided me prompted me to ask, “What is it? Fiction? A travel guide?” She just answered with her usual candor. “Just read it!” she would say. So I finally did.

There are heavily autobiographical elements in the book, so it’s difficult to tell where the memories begin and the actual history ends. Levi was an Italian doctor who wrote against Mussolini in the thirties and was exiled because of it, in the little town Gagliano (not its real name), for about a year in 1935; the next year, he and several other political prisoners were freed under general amnesty. The events in this book take place during that year, and but were only written down several years later, 1943-1944, when he was writing for an Underground resistance paper called “La Nazione del Popolo” in Florence.

The title ironically undercuts the entire book. The people of Gagliano say that “Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli” which means that the people of the town have not grown accustomed to human and humane things: Christian civilization, morality, any kind of historical progress. Levi’s carefully attentive documentation of their life challenges his self-perceived isolation; their life is as full of all the sadness, beauty, and joy that anyone else’s is. Gagliano isn’t the blessed paradise that we hear about from Peace Corps volunteers; it has just as many brigands, self-satisfied bureaucrats, and generation-long family rivalries as any other village where presumably “Christ did stop.”

Eventually, Levi is released as a political prisoner and therefore no longer obliged to stay there – but he finds it difficult to leave, even further testament to the humanity and likeability of its inhabitants. He returns to Florence to work with the Resistance, but never forgets his year-long stay at Gagliano. Like the American writer William Kennedy’s Albany cycle of novels, this book belongs to a rather small class in which a gifted writer goes to some small corner of the world, though his fictive craft makes it magical and wondrous, and then invites the entire world to come and see.