Conversations in Sicily
by Elio Vittorini
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Book Summary Information
Author: Elio VittoriniTranslator: Alane Salierno Mason
Foreword: Ernest Hemingway
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2000-11
ISBN: 0811214559
Number of pages: 144
Publisher: New Directions
Book Reviews of Conversations in Sicily
Book Review: If your interested in this, go ahead and read it...
Summary: 5 Stars
Had to read this for my Italian Lit class, and I'm glad I did. Otherwise I would've never known about the book. The historical background is really interesting...written in WWII-era fascist Italy, it is an anti-fascist novel and I'm surprised that it initially did get past the censors. Keep this in mind; the anti-fascist sentiment becomes clearer and clearer as you read: there's a reason Vittorini went to prison for this. The writing flows well in this translation and I find the author's use of repetition to be very interesting (the newspapers "blaring new massacres"). Also check out the importance of Silvestro's memory returning. If you like Hemmingway check out his foreward, which is one of the longest extended metaphors I've ever read and is really beautiful writing. Overall, this book is to be studied, but can be enjoyed casually nonetheless. Read this and enjoy it.
Summary of Conversations in Sicily
Conversations in Sicily holds a special place in the annals of literature.
It stands as a modern classic not only for its powerful thematic resonance as one of the great novels of Italian anti-fascism but also as a trailblazer for its style, which blends literary modernism with the pre-modern fable in a prose of lyric beauty. Comparing Vittorini's work to Picasso's, Italo Calvino described Conversations as "the book-Guernica."The novel begins at a time in the narrator's life when nothing seems to matter; whether he is reading newspaper posters blaring of wartime massacres, lying in bed with his wife or girlfriend, or flipping through the pages of a dictionary it is all the same to him?until he embarks on a journey back to Sicily, the home he has not seen in some fifteen years. In traveling through the Sicilian countryside and in variously hilarious and tragic conversations with its people?his indomitable mother in particular?he reconnects with his roots and rediscovers some basic human values.
In the introduction Hemingway wrote for the American debut of Conversations (published as In Sicily by New Directions in 1949) he remarked: "I care very much about Vittorini's ability to bring rain with him when he comes, if the earth is dry and that is what you need." More recently, American critic Donald Heiney wrote that in this one book, Vittorini "like Rabelais and Cervantes...adds a new artistic dimension to the history of literature."
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