New York: Penguin Books, Inc., 1948. Item #1291

Small paperback. 180 x 110 mm., [7 x 4 ¼ inches]. iv + 188pp., including final page listing other Penguin fiction titles. Coated illustrated paper cover. Near Fine: stamps indicate this small paperback was withdrawn from the Hill Reference Library in St. Paul, Minnesota—but everything about its solid state, uncracked spine, unfingered textblock suggests that it was never borrowed or read. Only slight sunning to spine and normal browning to textblock edges indicate its age.

First Penguin Edition (Italian edition first published 1945). Carlo Levi (1902-1975)—painter, writer, Jew, internal exile—became a moral reference point for Italian culture with the publication of Christ Stopped at Eboli in 1945. In it, he novelizes his real experiences in 1935-36 as a political dissident exiled by the Fascist regime from his urbane literary setting in Turin to the “outback” of a southern, impoverished village. The village was so inaccessible that even the locals saw it as beyond the reach of Christ, who would not have bothered to journey beyond Eboli. There Levi encountered an archaic, hard-scrabble peasant life of atavistic superstition, unquestioning Catholicism, and passive long-sufferance that he recounts without folkloric preciosity or patronizing analysis.

Price: $30.00