THE IMPOVERISHED, DESOLATE mountain regions of the Abruzzo during Mussolini's reign provide the backdrop for the three greatest novels by Ignazio Silone, one of the twentieth century's most important writers. In Fontamara, Bread and Wine, and The Seed Beneath the Snow - presented together for the first time in English to mark the centenary of the author's birth - Silone narrates the struggles of the cafoni, the farmers and peasants of his native Abruzzo, against poverty, natural disasters, and totalitarianism.
The first novel in the series, Fontamara, is a political fable that portrays the bitter trials of the villagers of Pescina as they battle with landowners who have appropriated their only source of water. First published from his exile in Zurich in 1933, and banned in his own country, the novel was translated into twenty languages and won Silone instant international literary fame.
Silone's masterpiece, Bread and Wine, introduces the semi-autobiographical character Pietro Spina, an anti-Fascist revolutionary who returns to his homeland after fifteen years in exile. He seeks refuge among the Abruzzo peasants by posing as the priest Don Paolo Spada.
Pietro's story continues in The Seed Beneath the Snow, Silone's personal favorite in the trilogy. Pietro Spina flees again and, with the police in close pursuit, is taken in by his grandmother Donna Maria Vincenza. Though comfortably settled in Italian bourgeois society, she jeopardizes her own life in order to protect him.

Customer Review: Good for Practice

Fontamara (at least) has another virtue, in addition to those cited by other reviewers: it's a pretty good text for practicing your Italian. Fairly simple language, straightforward grammar. Some street-talk and jargon but not a lot and hey, that's what learning is about. Some cute bits of peasant black humor to keep things moving. Not the edition here, of course: this one is in English. But there is a nifty Italian edition available from Manchester University Press in England (ISBN 0-7190-0662-7) with helpful notes and an excellent glossary by Judy Rawson.

Customer Review: brilliant, non-didactic political fiction

Silone's trilogy of novels about the rural Abruzzo region of Italy under fascist rule is beautifully written (and beautifully translated by Alexander Stille--a bad translaot can ruin a great work of literature). I can't quite put my finger out what it is, but there is something captivating about the prose. The three novels in this collection are also deeply political--but without being didactic, which is no easy feat. If you're trying to convey a message through fiction, it's all too easy to fall into using cardboard cut-out characters who hit you over the head with a message. This never happens in Silone's work, not once. Many authors, for instance, would be tempted to romanticize the cafoni, the down-trodden peasants of the area. Far from doing this, Silone shows the ways in which their oppression has made many of the cafoni bitter, greedy and envious. Neither is Silone's depiction of the cafoni entirely negative though--some of them are remarkable (particularly Berardo in the first novel Fontamara) and most are too grounded to be taken in by ideological abstractions. The main character of the second two novels, Pietro Spina, is a decent man, a former member of the Communist Party who has gone underground and, as he has had time to reflect on things, has drifted away from the party, seeing how its authoritiarianism and dogmatism stands at odds with the ideals it proclaims--but Spina still holds onto his socialist beliefs after some fashion. As Stille explains in his introduction (the first introduction to major literary work I haven't found dull), this reflects Silone's own life experiences. Interestingly though, Spina never becomes a mouthpiece for Silone's own Christian socialist beliefs--they are articulated in more subtle ways throughout the trilogy. This is a political novel in which there is no black and white, but only shades of grey; and in which human friendship is more important than anything else.

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