Book description
Vividly capturing the heat, sounds and smells of southern Italy,
Conversations in Sicily astounds with its modernity, lyricism and
originality. Driven by a sense of total disconnection, the narrator
embarks on a journey from northern Italy to Sicily, the home he has not
seen in some fifteen years. Through the conversations of the islanders
and a reunion with his mother, he gradually begins to feel reconnected.
But to what kind of world? Written during Mussolini's time in power,
Conversations in Sicily is one of the great novels of anti-fascism.
It is very hard to give any adequate sense of [its] power, rendered in
lucid, supple lines of almost Homeric simplicity whose cadences are
faithfully captured in this excellent new translation Elio Vittorini
was born in Siracusa, Sicily in 1908. An acclaimed translator (Defoe,
Faulkner, Lawrence, Steinbeck and Somerset Maugham) and broadcaster and
activist all his life, it wasn't until 1941 that Conversations in Sicily
first appeared. A highly outspoken critic of Mussolini and his fascist
government,Vittorini was arrested and jailed in 1942. He died in 1966.
