Christ Stopped at Eboli (Twentieth Century Classics S.) 
Customer Ratings: - Timeless story. I found out about this book while preparing for a trip to Italy. We were traveling to the region where this book is set, and it sounded like good background material. However, I found that this book tells a timeless story of poverty, the human spirit, and maintaining hope in the midst of a hopeless world. The writing and language is contemporary and stark and simply beautiful. I love this book.
- Unappreciative of This Work. Being a college student who has read already read a diverse amount of literature, I would have to say that Christ Stopped at Eboli was one of the worst novels I have read. I will say that Levi has mastered the use of descriptive language to very accurately portray the plight of the peasants, however he offers little compassion for the peasants and at times writes of them in a condescending manner. Perhaps his condescension is a true portrayal of class differences back then, however I could not identify in the least bit with Levi. Nor could I identify with the peasants, because there was absolutely no character development in this book. Levi wrote a descriptive novel -- he told things like he saw them, but without passion and intrigue. I found this novel to be very dry and mostly uninteresting. A college professor or older person may disagree, but from my standpoint this book had little to offer except that it was a good look at a different part of the world.
- Interesting, but slow going. Levi, a doctor and painter and intellectual, spent a year in the mid-1930 s in Gagliano, Lucania, a peasant town in southern Italy, exiled there by the Fascist government for unspecified political offenses. CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI is his sensitive and loving portrait of life in Gagliano. In many ways the peasants were still pagans (everything participates in divinity), Christianity as a religion had not yet penetrated that far south in Italy, in other words, Christ stopped at Eboli (a city somewhat north of Gagliano). Levi recounts in detail the lives and world-view of these Twentieth-Century European peasants, which is summarized in the following passage: This suffering together, this fatalistic, comradely, age-old patience, is the deepest feeling the peasants have in common, a bond made by nature rather than by religion.
Interesting as it is, the book moves slowly -- probably much like the pace of life in Gagliano, but too slowly for me. Levi is not a particularly rigorous or logical thinker, his mentality is more that of a poet. Yet the writing, while not quite pedestrian, is at times ponderous and never really outstanding (perhaps that is in part the fault of the translation). Hence, after reading the book, I was mildly surprised by the mostly glowing reviews on Amazon, and I initially refrained from posting my own review, thinking that perhaps I was being overly critical. But I just finished reading VOICES OF THE OLD SEA by Norman Lewis, which is a portrait of peasant life in two remote villages in Spain in the late 1940s. Despite the different countries and a 15-year gap in time, there are many similarities between the communal lives portrayed by Lewis and by Levi. Yet Lewis s is a much superior book, in large part because the pace is quicker and the prose far better. By no means do I wish to discourage anyone from reading CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI, but if you enjoyed it, or think you might enjoy it, I do encourage you to read VOICES OF THE OLD SEA as well. - Italian book. I ordered the book for my mother. She specifically selected the title. She loved the book.
- Great literature, poetry, canvassless painting and historic commentary. Levi provides great literature and great historic commentary. Cristo si e fermato a Eboli, represents a truly great literary work for the international market for it seems to me one of those books that can in fact be translated successfully. Levi s narration is gripping, one feels that the tome can be read in one seating. Before reading it I had hesitated in view of the obvious relation and similarity of the subject to the classic Verga s masterpieces on the corresponding condition of the Sicilian fishermen and farmers, literature which I thought rather hard to match. Although I still prefer Verga s work, Levi s comes close. It is interesting that alongside its poetic (in fact almost pictorial, Levi is also a painter of some relevance) and literary aspects the book did upon publication - and still does - provide a glimpse of the conditions of the Italian rural south that had gone, and in some respect still are, totally ignored, almost blocked out, by the rest of the country and especially by its government. Levi and Verga powerfully describe how the total abandonment of the Lucanian and Sicilian contadini managed to seamlessly - and culpably - survive the transitions from the the blithe sovereignty of the Neapolitan court to that of the Savoia s and eventually to that of the taxing Italian government in Rome (twenty years of fascism being hardly perceived in such a remote society). As a consequence the forgotten populace s shining knights are the briganti the bandits that in the South had to be crushed by the infant nation s army in a bloody civil war that lasted several years. Crushed the briganti were but not so thoroughly for a recalcitrant mass of people still survived that has since seen mafia or ndrangheta as cosa nostra, our thing. No wonder the Italian army (besides the customary carabinieri that are formally an army corps) had to be redeployed in very recent times in both Sicily and Sardinia. American readers will be surprised and amused by reading of the picture of one of their presidents being the only other venerated icon of the resigned contadini alongside that of the black faced Madonna di Viggiano.
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Christ Stopped at Eboli (Twentieth Century Classics S.) (ID: 0140183116)
