dukeofbookingham:Review | Bread and Wine by Ignazio SiloneGenre: fiction, literarySetting: Italy, 19
dukeofbookingham:Review | Bread and Wine by Ignazio SiloneGenre: fiction, literarySetting: Italy, 1935# of Pages: 277Rating: 5/5 The skinny: The guilt-ridden lapsed Italian Catholic and insufferable leftist intellectual at war in me are both fucking obsessed with this book for completely opposite but probably equally unhealthy reasons.The fat: I can’t fully articulate why I found this so captivating. In defiance of genre, Silone weaves a heavy tapestry from threads of fable, philosophy, morality play, and political subterfuge. A close, claustrophobic story lurking in the shadows of Mussolini’s fascist Italy at the outbreak of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, Bread and Wine follows the fervid, ailing revolutionary Pietro Spina into hiding after his ill-advised return from exile, his disguise as a provincial priest fraught with social and moral complications as he struggles by turns to educate and agitate the villagers who surround him. It’s the high revolutionary drama of Hugo, the cold calculation of le Carré, and the deep ideological strife of Eco, all radically compressed into 270 pages. Maybe this is melodramatic or maybe it’s fitting, but it feels like the literary equivalent of being abruptly knifed in the gut and having a few fleeting-yet-interminable hours to reconsider everything you thought you knew about life before you bleed to death. -- source link
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