The Voices of Carlo Levi

As a writer, Carlo Levi has had the misfortune to be known as the author of one book, Christ Stopped at Eboli, the account of his years of internal banishment by the Fascist authorities to a remote village in the south of Italy. That book was recognised as a masterpiece of anti-Fascist literature and as a sensitive investigation of the way of life of a people at the margins of European civilisation. It enjoyed enormous success in the post-war period not only in Italy but also in Britain and the USA, and has been continuously in print since its first publication. However, Levi was also a painter of some repute, a novelist, a journalist, a critic of art and society, a political commentator, and above all, a wholly idiosyncratic travel writer whose reports on the countries and regions he visited, including Sicily, Sardinia, Germany, the USSR and India, were also reflections on Italy. This book attempts to assess the totality of Levi's achievement