Book Report: "Christ Stopped at Eboli - The Story of a Year" by Carlo Levi

Book Report: Christ Stopped at Eboli - The Story of a Year by Carlo Levi

This book was recommended to me by my cousin Elaine who said if I was interested in learning more about the historic Southern Italy this book by Carlo Levi would offer great insights.

Levi wrote the book in 1945. Levi details his sojourn in Gagliano (pronounced ga-liano) that took place in1935 when he was exiled as an anti-fascist political prisoner to a small mountain village in Southern Italy. It was thought that sending and confining dissidents to one of these villages was worse than prison.

The title of the book, Christ Stopped at Eboli, signifies how the peasants felt about the godforsaken land of Southern Italy where they lived.

Eboli is a town about 60 miles south of Naples. The people in the southern provinces of Basilicata and Calabria would often say that they were forgotten by the State, by the Church, by their conquerors, by their landlords and by Christ himself. They were certain that Christ himself, had he been to Italy, would never have set foot south of Eboli because it was such a wasteland. They were even reluctant to call themselves Christians, a word that was equated with being human - they were merely animals, not human beings, south of Eboli.

Levi, (and certainly his translator as well), is both eloquent and down-to-earth in his descriptions of the people and events that took place during his year in Gagliano when he was embraced by the townsfolk as the new doctor. Levi had some medical background and his knowledge of medicine was a godsend to the people of Gagliano which, like the entire region was devastated by malaria. All the peasants had at their disposal to treat illness or injury were spells and magic and potions.

Levi repeatedly describes the poverty that is so ubiquitous a presence that it is an entity of itself and his story would make no sense otherwise. But he is not sentimental or sensational or detached in his recounting of the events of the people of Gagliano. He does so with a great deal of respect and even admiration for the peasants whose lives are a continual struggle against the powers that be and their own existential predicament.

The territory of Southern Italy had been conquered repeatedly by foreigners from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the Spaniards and the Bourbons. Given the perpetual state of poverty and of being the conquered, the peoples of Southern Italy devised many survival strategies which included a certain temperament of the people - a kind of balance between rebellion and despair, ancient superstitions and belief in magic and spells, unquestioned customs and rites.

My interest in the book stems from the fact that my paternal grandparents both came from a mountain town in Calabria. Although they came to America in 1910, before Levi’s year in exile, they came out of the same poverty and environment. I was able to relate my visit to the town of my ancestors in Calabria in 1968 with much of what Levi described. I can’t help but wonder which, if any, of my character traits or psyche are rooted in that ancient Calabrian consciousness.

This book may not hold the interest of most of my readers but is certainly and eye-opener for anyone whose ancestors came from Southern Italy. Most Americans of Italian descent have no idea. And today, when some Americans are so afraid of immigrants and ready to build walls, the stories of yesterday's immigrants have lessons for us.

 If interested, you can read some excerpts at Amazon.

Also recommended is the PBS Documentary Series, The Italian Americans

ADDENDUM - EXCERPT FROM MY MEMOIR:  1968 trip from school in Rome to Spadola

My fascination with Italy, my desire to learn the language, and my plan to visit Grandma’s village were all part of an unarticulated scheme to consolidate my fragile identity as an Italian and establish my right to belong, if not in Italy, then in my own family. After all, it was Grandma who once told me: “You are not-a like-a the other grandchil’ren.” Perhaps I would fit in better if I were more Italian.

During the Thanksgiving break I went to visit my father’s aunt and uncle in a small village in Calabria, in Southern Italy. Spadola was the town where my paternal grandparents lived before sailing to Ellis Island on their way to Hartford, Connecticut’s Italian neighborhood. Without much of a plan, I hitched a ride to Naples with a fellow student who had a car, and from there I was able to hop a train to Vibo Valencia, the closest station to Spadola.

In a forlorn trattoria near the train station, I ordered a plate of spaghetti and, having no idea how I would complete my journey, I asked the waiter how to get to Spadola. My inquiry was soon relayed to a group of men who interrupted their wine drinking and loud talk to huddle like members of a soccer team deliberating a strategy. One of them emerged, having been appointed by the team: a middle-aged man with several days’ growth of beard, a scruffy v-neck sweater and an English style cap. A cigarette hung precariously from the corner of his mouth sending smoke into his right eye. 

He took the cigarette with his thumb and index finger and, exhaling a lungful of smoke, he said in a mix of English and Italian, “I take-a you a Spadola, dieci milla lire, va bene?” For about sixteen dollars American, he would drive me the forty-five or fifty kilometers to Spadola.

Desperation, or at least a lack of options, made it easier for me to trust this guy. We got in his Fiat Cinquecento and we drove off together into the hills. As soon as we reached the top of the first big hill in the middle of nowhere (there is, apparently, a “middle of nowhere” not too far from everywhere else on the planet), we came to a slow roll as Guido took his foot off the accelerator. As we passed the crest of the hill and, with obvious deliberation, he then turned the key off, killing the car’s engine. He turned to me and smiled. This made me more than just a little nervous.

I asked him what was going on, “Che succede?”

“Non preoccuparti,” he replied for me not to worry.

Then he rattled off something in an Italian dialect that I did not understand as he simultaneously lit a cigarette and let the car roll down the hill. I learned that there were plenty of mountains between Vibo Valencia and Spadola but no petrol stations. Guido was determined to save gas however he could.

We eventually arrived in Spadola with fuel to spare and my driver was able to locate my relatives by asking a villager. My father’s aunt, Zi’Giuseppina and uncle, Zi’Francesco, were unprepared for my arrival, as I had never given them a definite day or time to expect me. But they and other relatives in the village were more than welcoming and accommodating.

My father’s cousin Vito, whom Dad never met, owned a small general store and he secured a piece of beefsteak for dinner on my first night there. This was a gesture of respect and honor for a relative from America—a kindness I didn’t feel I deserved. On the contrary, I was embarrassed to be the only one at the table with meat on his plate. Such gestures made me aware that I was an outsider, no matter what my bloodline. There were very few young people in the old village, most having left to find jobs in large cities. 

One middle-aged Spadolese, perhaps slightly embarrassed by the poverty of his town and with a sharp flavor of resentment in his voice, told me, in fairly good English: “You come-a here ehn you see how-a we are live. Then you-a go back-a your big villa in Ah-mee-rica and tell everybody how poor we ah’ here. You will-a never come-a back. You too good-a for us, no?”

The short time I spent in Spadola gave me a first-hand perspective on Grandma’s stories and my roots as well as three-dimensional memories to try to fit into my new identity: my great aunt and great uncle’s home with a fire pit in the kitchen and the pot of espresso brewing in the embers; the sound of zampogne—ancient Roman bagpipes—playing pastoral hymns at dawn in honor of the novena to Saint Nicholas; the hunt for wild mushrooms with cousin Vito and his two kids; the town’s ancient fountain; the church my grandmother helped to build. 

But all of these images, rather than bring me closer to my identity, only made me more keenly aware of the fact that I was very different and did not belong. Having grown up in a small New England city where we were the “Italians” among the “Irish” and the “Polish” and the “French,” I never thought of myself as“American” until some Italian university students, pointing to a group of us from the U.S. and gesturing wildly, referred to us as quegli americani—those Americans. 

I never expected my quest for an identity to entail my being an American. I would never be an Italian, nor did I feel like I would ever really fit into the Italian-American culture of big weddings, baby-making, baptisms, and huge family gatherings.

Book Report - Gossip by Christopher Bram

A summer read, Gossip by Christopher Bram kept me awake, which is all I ask of a book.

I read the book in four days - a near record for me.

I chose this book because I have read Christopher Bram before, namely, Father of Frankenstein, (which became Gods and Monsters in its film adaptation) and Hold Tight, a sexy thriller set in 1940s New York male bordello with a young Navy man and lots of intrigue.

(Note: Unfortunately for authors nowadays, you can buy a used book on Amazon for pennies.)

Gossip is set in New York City also (and Washington DC) in the 1980s. It was written contemporaneously and some of the references to computers, chat-rooms, telephones and media seem very dated and almost silly in view of the rapid developments in technology since then. But the story has substance.

Christopher Bram is not only a masterful storyteller who uses words with an efficiency that leaves no sentence superfluous, but he's also an insightful creator of characters, almost all of whom are drawn in complex dimensions. You glimpse their inner thoughts while seeing and hearing their outward actions and words.

The story is about Ralph, a gay liberal, onetime AIDS activist who gets involved with Bill, a closeted, Republican, DC journalist who's about to publish a trashy, anti-feminist expose about Hillary Clinton and Washington career women. Ralph finds himself "sleeping with the enemy" and is both perplexed and intrigued by his own attraction.

The story takes a turn a bit past the half-way mark when things get a bit like House of Cards - power, politics, homophobia, Christian fundamentalist religion, illegal activity and gay activism all come together to morph into a mystery novel. The author reveals psychological insights into each character and demonstrates the power of unrelated circumstances to produce something akin to existential chaos in an individual's life.

Gossip is just a good read.

Book Report: Jack Holmes and His Friend by Edmund White

Sometimes I don't know why I bother to read a book, something I do so seldom anyhow that I could be considered illiterate by the standards of any well-read individual. My mind wanders, I tend to fall asleep, or at the very least nod off until I snap my neck and wake myself. Then I must re-read the last several paragraphs, sometimes even several pages to get myself back into the flow of the story.

It usually takes me weeks to finish a book, with so many priorities on the to-do list above sitting and reading: walking the dog, doing laundry, grocery shopping, reading a blog or two, filling the coffee canister, brushing the dog, cutting out coupons, etc.

Jack Holmes and His Friend by Edmund White was no exception. I started it on the plane to New Mexico in March and just finished it. I went back to the beginning after reading the epilogue and found that I barely recognized the narrative or any of the minor characters that appeared in the first part. This is partly due to having a memory like a sieve and partly due to the fact that I don't pay close attention if something doesn't get up and grab it.

I chose the book based on the fact that White is a gay author (A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White plays a part in my own memoir, to be published this fall) and it received good reviews.

I am not intellectual enough to appreciate the nuances of superb writing, and I only do my reports on books that I actually finish - in other words, books that didn't put me to sleep more often than they kept me awake. (I have never gotten through In One Person by John Irving, for example. I found I was bored beyond belief. But that's just me. I suppose intellectuals love it.)

So Jack Holmes, a gay man coming into his own in New York during the late fifties and early sixties finds he's attracted to his straight friend, Will, who he never ends up having sex with. The two are the gay and straight versions of newly sexually liberated men, and White juxtaposes their proclivities and their sexuality with some interesting narrative, observations and descriptions. But not interesting enough for me to read the book in a week. The story follows their "friendship" into the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

The New York Times reviewer was impressed with White's portrayal of physicality, sex and sensuality, which was the essence of the work. Perhaps having seen way too much porn, I found the sex rather matter-of-fact, rather than eye-opening.

The book was available on Amazon for something like fifty cents, used.

Gay Pride Month "Out of the Closets - Voices of Gay Liberation" a review of sorts: Part 2

As we await the Supreme Court decisions on Prop 8 and DOMA we should be aware of how far we've come and that the struggle is not over.

Lest we forget:

From Out of the Closets, "My Soul Vanished From Sight: A California Saga of Gay Liberation" by Konstantin Berlandt
The bars are havens for that until-that-day crowd... 
Limits: No dancing except in the back, no dancing close, no kissing. The bar is owned by a gay commune who work together to keep it open. Jim, one of the owners pulls Neil and me apart, "If you want to do that, go home and do it." Your kiss is obscene! 
... 
Outside on the street the men from the bar separate, no touching, thaey walk off  passing as straight men. The bedroom is a closet, the bar is a closet, the closet is a jail cell. You're let out if you can go straight, act straight, and don't get caught.


From Out of the Closets, "The Closet Syndrome" by Stuart Byron
From the beginning of the gay liberation movement, the Stonewall riots of June 1969, the Times and other elements of the mass media have misunderstood just how traumatic and new and courageous is "coming out." It is famous that the riots were covered in the Times on inside pages while at the same time - the very same time - front page attention was being given to some trees chopped down by vigilantes in a homosexual cruising area in Queens. In the perspective of events, of course, the paper was dead wrong: the Queens trees represent a minor incident in gay history; the Stonewall began a movement and an era.

Gay Pride Month "Out of the Closets - Voices of Gay Liberation" a review of sorts

In celebration of Gay Pride, and to provide a bit of perspective on our collective gay history, I have decided to post a few quotes from a book I am reading called Out of the Closets, Voices of Gay Liberation copyright 1972 by Karla Jay and Allen Young, Editors. Published by Douglas Book Corporation. (Available on Amazon)

The book gives a historical perspective of the LGBT civil rights movement and is a series of snapshots written by a variety of authors each with a different viewpoint on the thought and struggle as it was in the late 1960's and early 70's.

I picked up the book last summer at the Provincetown United Methodist Church Thrift Shop - a great place to find some interesting books.

I am fascinated by Gay history and the Gay Lib era: such documentaries as Before Stonewall (unfortunately not currently available on Netflix) and books like Out of the Closets, provide important lessons that we should ensure get passed to future generations along with more recent and historical landmark changes and current progress being brought about by the marriage equality movement.

We have definitely come a long way since 1972. But there is, I think, something essential and valuable about Gay Liberation that has been lost or forgotten.  I have said this before in other essays and still believe in its validity: In some ways, the Gay Liberation movement was a radical experiment that was aborted by the AIDS Crisis.

The experiment was, I think, headed in a very different direction from the current path of marriage equality. Perhaps we would have eventually ended up exactly where we are now without the powerful influence of HIV/AIDS intervening - a twist in gay history that outed many individuals against their will and which brought homosexuality into the news and into the consciousness of the larger society.

HIV/AIDS ignited a new activism that had its roots in Gay Liberation - and in the earlier Civil Rights movement in which many gay and lesbian persons were involved and for which they felt a great affinity.

Historical events (philosophically we can debate whether they were random or inevitable events),  certainly have  conspired to bring us where we are today. In spite of the mainstreaming of the LGBT community - and I'm not convinced we have been entirely mainstreamed or that mainstreaming is what we would all prefer or want - we still experience the ignorance, hate and prejudice of those who do not understand us, who will not hear us, and who believe in their own moral superiority. We are in many ways still facing the same issues as the writers in Out of the Closets.

Marriage equality on a national level will certainly improve the legal status of our relationships but will not necessarily make us equal in the eyes of everyone on the planet. Look at the riots in France, the lawmakers in Uganda, the executions in Muslim nations, and at the discrimination by religious believers in the US - whether its brutal gay bashings and murder in Greenwich Village or the Catholic Church firing employees who marry a same gender partner or a bakery owner who refuses to sell a wedding cake to a same-gender couple. Our lived experience is discounted, ignored, devalued and ridiculed on a daily basis.

So here is  a bit of gay historical perspective: (I am quoting the following passages without permission of the authors under the "Fair Use" provision of copyright law)

From Out of the Closets: here's what Martha Shelly said in the chapter Gay is Good (originally published in Rat February 24,1970; copyright 1970 by Rat):

Understand this - that the worst part of being a homosexual is having to keep it a secret. Not the occasional murders by police or teenage queer-beaters, not the loss of jobs or the expulsion from schools or dishonorable discharges - but the daily knowledge that what you are is so awful that it cannot be revealed. The violence against us is sporadic. Most of us are not affectd. But the internal violence of being made to carry - or choosing to carry - the load of your straight society's unconscious guilt - this is what tears us apart, what makes us want to stand up in the offices, in the factories and schools, and shout out our true identities.

We were rebels from our earliest days - somewhere, maybe just about the time we started to go to school, we rejected straight society - unconsciously...The homosexuals who hide, who play it straight, or pretend that the issue of homosexuality is unimportant, are only hiding the truth from themselves. They are trying to become a part of a society that they rejected instinctively when they were five years old, to pretend it is the result of heredity, or a bad mother, or anything but a gut reaction of nausea against the roles forced on us.

From Out of the Closets: here's what Charles P. Thorp has to say in a chapter called I.D., Leadership and Violence from a keynote speech for the National Students' Liberation front Conference, San Francisco, August 21, 1970:

We have come to see that it is the fairies, faggots queens, etc. that were, through their blatentness (sic), the first to challenge the system.  In essence they were saying they had a right to be Super-Gay because Blatent (sic) is Beautiful We also know that it will not be until what straights call "blatent (sic) behavior is accepted with respect that we are in any sense, any of us, free. For it is Blatent (sic) Faggotry that they really hate. We are all blatent (sic), unless we're ashamed of being Gay and this is why we are all hated.

We may be liberated, we may be out and proud, we may be mainstreamed and married, but we mustn't let our guard down. We mustn't be complacent. Don't mistake lip service and legal protections for acceptance (not to say that acceptance is our goal) or tolerance for understanding, or acceptance for love, because the truth is that straight folk, even the most liberal and progressive, don't really "get it", don't really get us.

Happily, many youngsters are finding the courage at a young age to come out and to shout out their true identities; unfortunately many others who live under still oppressive cultural and religious beliefs see suicide as their only option. This is unacceptable and those institutions and individuals who persist in demonizing LGBT individuals and our sexuality must be held accountable for taking innocent lives.

- Reluctant Rebel, but rebel nonetheless.