I’ve never thought of reading as a relaxing escape from the world. It seems to me it’s the opposite. It may be done silently, while you’re alone for the few minutes you may or may not have, but it’s active, physical engagement. Nothing passive about it. And though I still cling to this belief, I’ll admit that lately I have reached for the solace of one book or another as a respite from the relentlessness of the news.
Yesterday morning I happened to notice Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli in the middle of a stack of books. Then, later in the day, I noticed the same title while scanning another teetery stack in another room. You can imagine the book clutter of this house. The other day I found a library book in the microwave. Sorry, Lucinda. It makes me think of the guy who had so many books in his New York apartment that one day they all collapsed on him and he suffocated to death, if I have that story right. Where was I? Two copies of Christ Stopped Eboli. It’s not that unusual. When I like a book it brings me joy to buy it again (or finding a second or third copy at the book shed, the greatest place in the face of the earth, long live the book shed). Still, in this case, I hadn’t remembered buying or finding another copy of Christ Stopped at Eboli. I read it once, years ago. And though I could recall loving it, I couldn’t remember a thing about it other than a sense of calmness. This too isn’t unusual. I love a lot of books I can’t remember. You know what I mean? Aren’t there certain books, or even only the covers of certain books, that slow you down a little just to look at them even if you’ve no longer any idea what they were about? That’s what happened to me yesterday. I pulled out one of my two copies of Christ Stopped at Eboli and I could swear my pulse rate lowered.
In 1935, Levi was a young doctor, painter, and writer living in Turin. He was also Jewish in a country that had begun to implement discriminatory racial laws against Jews. Levi wasn’t cowed by much of anything, laws or no laws, and he spoke out against Mussolini and his fascist government, in particular the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. He was arrested and found guilty of whatever they said he was guilty of. But then, this odd thing, quaint almost: He wasn’t imprisoned or brutalized—rather he was banished from the north to the south. At the time this wasn’t considered a light sentence. To an ordinary northerner, southern Italy evoked a kind of horror. South? You want me to live in the south? The level of poverty in the south, at that time, was nearly unfathomable. But Levi wasn’t an ordinary Italian, he wasn’t an ordinary human being, and that’s what makes Christ Stopped at Eboli so flat-out glorious, now that I’m reading it again. It’s an account of his time of internal exile in Gagliano yes, but above all it is about the people he meets there. People I’m determined now not to forget, but if I do it’s lucky that I have two copies to consult. On the second page, Levi writes: “The greatest travelers have not gone beyond the limits of their own world…”
As I’ve read on over the last couple of days, something strange. I’ve started to remember things about the book, scenes I haven’t yet reached this time around. One of them has become vivid. I’m looking forward to coming upon it again soon enough. But here’s what I now recall. I don’t know if it is at all accurate. Most likely it isn’t. But there’s something moving to me about details of a once-read book emerging from the fog of my brain. Levi visits an old priest or an old former priest and, if I’m remembering right, his even older mother. They live in a cave-like hovel. There’s hardly any light. Mother and son are more like shadows than people. Moldy books line the walls. The ancient mother is continually coughing. The two are drinking something, maybe tea, out of the same glass, because they appear to have only one glass between them. In an attempt to show Levi hospitality, they offer him a drink from the glass, and he accepts.
Peter Orner is a novelist, story writer, and essayist—as well as chair of the English and Creative Writing department at Dartmouth. His most recent book, Still No Word from You, was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. He is a volunteer with the Norwich Fire Department.