Conversations in Sicily
Vittorini, Elio / Hemingway, Ernest / Mason, Alane Salierno
It stands as a modern classic not only for its powerful thematic resonance as one of the great novels of Italian anti-fascism but also as a trailblazer for its style, which blends literary modernism with the pre-modern fable in a prose of lyric beauty. Comparing Vittorini's work to Picasso's, Italo Calvino described Conversations as "the book-Guernica."
The novel begins at a time in the narrator's life when nothing seems to matter, whether he...