Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi
This is Levi’s account of the year he spent in an isolated southern Italian town, Gagliano, having been exiled there by Mussolini’s government because of his political views. Although the year is 1935-36, the conditions he finds seem more akin to at least a century earlier. The peasants have to work tirelessly to eke out a subsistence existence from the harsh, parched land. The bourgeoisie, church and aristocrats who should try and provide some communal support for their harsh lives instead exhibit the worst elements of bureaucratic rigidity and incompetence whilst pursuing their own petty internecine feuds. The peasants, therefore, fall back on their own traditions and superstitions, disdainful of the state who they know do not care for them. Their life follows a pattern barely touched by the modern world. Rome seems as distant as Mars. The title expresses this idea: Christ’s mercy stopped at the town of Eboli, eighty five miles north of Gagliano – the people of this town have been abandoned by everyone and everything human or spiritual.
Levi is an educated renaissance man who trained as a doctor but is pursuing the life of an artist when he is exiled. His skills as a doctor, out of practice as they are, earn him the respect of the peasants because he displays a human response to the suffering around him and does not try to exploit this by selling expensive medicines. Later, his paintings provide a source of cultural entertainment for the villagers. That, however, is jumping ahead because much of the book is concerned with a rather predictable narrative arc: Levi is at first shocked and bewildered by the brutal nature of life in Gagliano and the rather rigid, primitive and superstitious beliefs that regulate behaviour and relationships in the town; then he gradually develops respect for the stoical way the villagers deal with their hard lives, and begins to develop ever warmer, appreciative relationships with them.
This is obviously an important book simply because of the time and period it covers and the lost Italian society it presents. However, nothing in this book particularly surprised me; nor did I gain any insight into the psychology of a member of the cognoscenti ripped away from the cultural milieu of Rome and set down in a cultural backwater. At no time was there any sense of jeopardy for Levi. He may have been in exile but he was protected by his class and wealth and there was a sense that he was just seeing out time. Which is what happened as he returned to his former life after only a year in exile.
I suspect that my response to this novel is not typical. After all the book is deemed a classic of modern Italian literature, was turned into a film and is considered to have played an important role in awakening post war Italy to the terrible living conditions of people in the poor southern region of the country. There is no doubt it is a significant book but Levi’s detached writing style meant that, for me, it remained an interesting historical curiosity rather than an exploration of the cost of exile and insight into what the peasants felt about their lives which I had hoped to read.