Conversations In Sicily - Softcover

Particularly reminiscent of Knut Hamsun's great novel Hunger, Conversations in Sicily is a strange, paradoxical work that echoes the existentialist concerns of Camus' fiction while capturing vividly the heat and sounds and smells of southern Italy. The novel begins at a time in the unnamed narrator's life when nothing seems to matter. He is filled with a deep sense of ennui and feels disconnected from all that surrounds him. That is until he embarks on a journey to Sicily, the home he has not seen in some fifteen years. Alane Mason's new translation succeeds wonderfully in bringing this evocative and brilliant novel alive. It is a superb work of fiction, one of the great novels of anti-fascism and a book that is sure to astound contemporary readers for its modernity, lyricism, originality and freshness

ELIO VITTORINI was born in Siracusa, Sicily in 1908. An acclaimed translator (Defoe, Faulkner, Lawrence, Steinbeck and Somerset Maugham) and broadcaster and activist all his life, it wasn't until 1941 that Conversations in Sicily first appeared. A highly outspoken critic of Mussolini's and his fascist government, Vittorini was arrested and jailed in 1942. He died in 1966.