The Watch
by .Farrar, Straus & Yong, $3.73.
The new book by the author of Christ Stopped at Eboli is neither fiction nor straight documentary. It’s hard to say to what extent personal experience has been retouched in this kaleidoscopic narrative, in the first person singular, which evokes the face and feel of post-war Rome just before and after the last Cabinet of “men of the Resistance” resigned. Dr. Levi’s underlying theme is the crumbling of the high hopes of sweeping reforms; and flashbacks to wartime Florence and Milan contrast the exalted spirit of the Resistance with the political backsliding and factionalism of 1945-46.
The Watch is a succession of individual episodes — a gathering of newspapermen over wine and pizza: a jeep ride through the slums of Rome; an encounter with a brigand on the road to Naples. Above all, this is a book made up of people — a conniving landlady, several intellectuals, beggars, prostitutes, a variety of odd specimens. Some are briefly glimpsed in a vignette of, sav, a sidewalk black market. Some are fully sketched. Some are the protagonists in a miniature réfit; Giuseppe, for instance, who by his wits became “The King of Poggioreale"; an old crone who lived forty years in Broccalino, l .S.A., and who tells what an awful struggle she had to get a passport to return to Italy — President Rosa Verde didn’t want Italy to see how America had ruined her beauty.
The Watch is at times eloquent or amusing, and at times the going gets moderately dull; it has not the sharpness and the poignant life of Christ Stoppe l at Eboli.