Ignazio Silone was one of Italy's most respected 20th-century novelists. His best-known work, Fontamara, is a dramatic account of peasant life in the Abruzzi, where he was born in 1900. He was always a political, or perhaps an anthropological, novelist, portraying the values of his cafoni with a wonderful, sympathetic realism; but he also had a very sharp eye for the way political power was used, and for the impact of the Fascist regime even on remote Southern villages. His early novels, particularly Bread and Wine, are centred on an anguished debate about the possibility of maintaining one's integrity in a corrupt, self-seeking society that demands lies and collusion. Written in exile, these books were strongly anti-Fascist in tone, and, when translated, contributed to making Mussolini's regime less popular abroad in the mid-1930s than it had been ten years earlier.

LRB 9 August 2001 | PDF Download