Bitter Spring
A Life of Ignazio Silone
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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 most influential and widely translated work of antifascism in the 1930s. In World War II, the U.S. Army printed unauthorized versions of it, along with Silone's Bread and Wine, and distributed them throughout Italy during the country's Nazi occupation. During the cold war, he was an outspoken opponent of Soviet oppression and was twice considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Twenty years after his death, Silone was the object of controversy when reports arose indicating that he had been an informant for the Fascist police. Pugliese's biography, the most comprehensive work on Silone by far and the first full-length biography to be published in English, evaluates all the evidence and paints a portrait of a complex figure whose life and work bear themes with contemporary relevance and resonance. Bitter Spring, the winner of the 2008 Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History, is a memorable biography of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers against totalitarianism in all its forms, set amid one of the most troubled moments in modern history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
There was a time when Ignazio Silone was the most famous Italian author in the world. His earliest novels, such as Fontamara and Bread & Wine, were praised for their depictions of peasant life in his native Abruzzo. As Pugliese reveals in this solid and engaging biography, Silone's literary reputation in his own country was complicated by his political legacy; having joined the Italian Communists to advocate social justice and fight fascism, the author was dismayed by the party's authoritarian tendencies and was eventually expelled. Pugliese (whose previous book was on Carlo Rosselli, Silone's contemporary in the Italian socialist movement) builds his biographical case in careful blocs of information, describing the drama while maintaining the narrative. This holds true even during a review of the controversial discovery, 20 years after Silone's death, of documents that suggest he might have given information to the Fascist police while still a Party member. In graceful prose, Pugliese offers a few intriguing theories (was Silone shielding someone? was he hiding a homosexual affair?), but reluctantly concedes that we may never know the full truth. Whatever did happen, Pugliese concludes, led Silone to create "some of the most poignant and powerful fiction of the 20th century."