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Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone

4.23 of 5 stars 4.23 · rating details · 13 ratings · 2 reviews

One of the major figures of twentieth-century European literature, Ignazio Silone (1900–78) is the subject of this award-winning new biography by the noted Italian historian Stanislao G. Pugliese. A founding member of the Italian Communist Party, Silone took up writing only after being expelled from the PCI and garnered immediate success with his first book, Fontamara, the...more

Hardcover, 448 pages

Published June 9th 2009 by Farrar Straus & Giroux (T)

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Sep 02, 2009 Tony rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography

Pugliese, Stanislao G. BITTER SPRING: A Life of Ignazio Silone. (2009). ****. Back in school, I took a course entitled: “Modern European Literature.” the reading list was long, and included works by Sartre, Malraux, Camus and Silone. I wondered who Silone was; I had never heard of him. Turns out that there were three novels of his that we had to read: “Fontamara,” “Bread and Wine,” and “The Seed Beneath the Snow.” I was totally enthralled with his writing, and believed that these novels were the...more Pugliese, Stanislao G. BITTER SPRING: A Life of Ignazio Silone. (2009). ****. Back in school, I took a course entitled: “Modern European Literature.” the reading list was long, and included works by Sartre, Malraux, Camus and Silone. I wondered who Silone was; I had never heard of him. Turns out that there were three novels of his that we had to read: “Fontamara,” “Bread and Wine,” and “The Seed Beneath the Snow.” I was totally enthralled with his writing, and believed that these novels were the epitomy of anti-Fascist works. In all three novels, all set in the Abruzzi region of Italy, Silone glorified the resistance of the “cafoni” to any totalitarian regime. At the time, having grown up in an Italian neighborhood, the work cafone was a slur against the status of anyone called that name. Literally, it means “peasant,” but with a derisive connotation. Silone did not use it in that sense. To him, these inhabitants of southern Italy made their living from the land, and maintained their honor and firm resistance to any interference from government organizations. The novels were extremely well written and the plots were spare and direct. At the time, there were no works in English that provided more information about the author. This work finally gives us a life of Silone that provides the background to his novels and a history of his political activity both before and after WW II. He was born in Pescia in the Abruzzi region in 1900. In 1915, an earthquake struck the region. Out of a population of 3,000, 1,500 people were killed, including Silone’s mother. He was the one who had to dig her out of the ruins. The government was of little help in the rescue effort, and the inhabitants had to fend for themselves. This provided the first instance of Silone’s distrust of centralized government. He became a Communist and a member of the PCI before the war, and ultimately had to go into exile in Switzerland until the mid-1940s. It was there that he began to write his novels, along with a raft of non-fiction – mostly of a political nature. He was apparently a very private man and difficult to get to know. His few friends approached him with caution. One of his friends, Darina Laracy, said: “Better to read a writer than to meet him.” This biography fills a long-existing gap in the history of Silone and his works. Recommended.(less)

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Mar 15, 2009 Ron rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography, politics, radical, authors

Now I feel bad that I've never read any Ignazio Silone; apparently he's like John Steinbeck and George Orwell rolled into one. This was an interesting biography; it's academic, and sometimes a bit disjointed, but Silone's life--spurred to political activism by his childhood in an Italian peasant village, but so opposed to authoritarianism that he had just as many problems with the communists as the fascists--is compelling.

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