Books: Island of Fantasy

WORDS ARE STONES: IMPRESSIONS OF SICILY (212 pp.)—Carlo Lev!—Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($3.75).

Underneath Sicily lies forever a Cyclops, crushed beneath the land’s great weight, through the -vengeance of the gods. His mouth is beneath Etna, and hurls forth flames of lava . . .

To plain Sicilians, such legends are not old wives’ tales but part of everyday life —along with Christian miracles, Saracen tales of derring-do, and glittering fantasies of the U.S. way of life. The background against which these visions take shape is composed of blasted heaths and stark, sun-baked mountains; in the foreground are a rich aristocracy and poor peasantry whose lot is still hard despite the great strides toward prosperity made by Sicily in the past decade. Between the two extremes roam the brigands and the men of the Mafia, who from time immemorial have existed by making the “protection” indispensable to prince and peasant.

Carlo Levi is a north Italian, but he is one of the few writers alive who can bring Sicily to the printed page without losing a scrap of myth, beauty and horror. In Christ Stopped at Eboli (TIME, May 5, 1947), Levi dealt with life in Lucania, an even poorer region, and the book brought him such fame that he now writes with a special sense of mission about the Italian poor. His weaknesses are 1) too much self-consciousness in his pleading, 2) too little skepticism respecting the left. Yet few will read Author Levi’s Impressions of Sicily without feeling a forgiving sympathy for both these weaknesses.

Resurrection. Among other scenes. Author Levi describes the dark sulphur mines of Lercara, owned by the terrible Cyclopean figure of Signor N. In their underground world, the mine workers have only recently discovered the weapons of the trade union and the strike, and in this “ordinary, normal episode of social struggle,” Levi sees something comparatively religious—a kind of resurrection.

With a brilliant eye for contrast, he leaves these “resurrected” to describe a nearby cemetery where 8.000 mummies are on view, dating from the 16th century to as late as 1920, and including priests, professors, young virgins, even “an American consul with a big black mustache.” The book is at its best in an account of how New York City’s Mayor Vincent (“Mr. Impy”) Impellitteri returned to his native village in 1951. With no blasphemous intent, Levi describes the visit in the way some of the simpler Sicilians might have seen it—as the story of the Saviour repeated in modern form.

Adoration. In their eyes, Isnello (“a village of shepherds”) was not Signor Im-pellitteri’s birthplace; it was the place of his “nativity.” Long before Mr. Impy appeared, “wise men” were gathered “in adoration” before the hovel (at the corner of Bethlehem Lane) where he was born. When Mr. Impy finally arrived, he made his triumphal entry in a grey Pontiac rather than on an ass: thousands ran forward to touch the blessed vehicle and draw sustenance from its sheen. Americans may remember Impellitteri merely as an uninspired politician and second-rate mayor of New York. But in Sicily, says Author Levi. it all went to show that nowadays the “kingdom of Heaven [is] called America,” and that this being so. “no crucifixion, no Golgotha” was needed to complete Mr. Impy’s myth—only “a large luncheon, which was not the Last Supper.”