Conversations in Sicily - Vittorini

[Gail]

This is a very short little book that I thought was so well written and translated that I went back and read sections again.
The story takes place in a unspecified year after the first world war and during the Fascist era in Italy. The main character was about 11 years old during the first war so we have a timeline that places us before or in WWII.
The author was born in Sicily and our Main Character travels to the place of his birth in the mountains of Sicily almost without any forethought or planning. It is his mother's birthday and after receiving a letter from his father he sets off by multiple trains and a ferry. Upon his arrival he has conversations with his mother and his mother's neighbors. He goes with her on her medical rounds (she gives injections) and he gets drunk with a group of people he meets in her village.
That is largely the sum total of the plot.
What makes the book a thoughtful investigation is the way that the author has the Main Character respond to his own depression on what looks to be the doom of the world:
"That was the terrible part: the quietude of my hopelessness; to believe mankind to be doomed, and yet to feel no fever to save it, but instead to nourish a desire to succumb with it."
Also, the conversations that the Main Character has throughout the book are truly a continuation of his journey. His conversation with his mother, a women he has not seen for 15 years, proceeds so that he begins to understand some of how she exists in the world. The interaction with the local population during the trip, makes clear that people are starving and that the "policeman" of the country are bigoted and only looking to uphold the conventional order. The conversations with the locals near his mother speak of the "outrage to the world for which we suffer".
Reviewers have speculated that the book is a treatise against Fascist government that was coached in such a way that the author, Vittorini, would not be punished for his opinions. Others talk about the interior dialogue of a dream. Overall, I found it to be a bit of both and a well done example of an anti-war book weighted with the common despair of people with little ability to understand the world.