Text: English, Italian (translation)

Conversation in Sicily (Quartet encounters)

Literature & Fiction

Vittorini, Elio

Genre Fiction

Quartet Books

Conversazione in Sicilia (nome e lacrime) (Italian texts)

Manchester University Press

Women of Messina (New Directions Book) (English and Italian Edition)

Literary

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

Women of Messina

New Directions Publishing Corporation

A Vittorini Omnibus: In Sicily, the Twilight of the Elephant (New Directions Book) (English and Italian Edition)

A Vittorini Omnibus: Twilight of the Elephant, In Sicily, La Garibaldina (New Directions Books)

Contemporary

New Directions

Conversations in Sicily holds a special place in the annals of literature. 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 is reading newspaper posters blaring of wartime massacres, lying in bed with his wife or girlfriend, or flipping through the pages of a dictionary it is all the same to him―until he embarks on a journey back to Sicily, the home he has not seen in some fifteen years. In traveling through the Sicilian countryside and in variously hilarious and tragic conversations with its people―his indomitable mother in particular―he reconnects with his roots and rediscovers some basic human values. In the introduction Hemingway wrote for the American debut of Conversations (published as In Sicily by New Directions in 1949) he remarked: "I care very much about Vittorini's ability to bring rain with him when he comes, if the earth is dry and that is what you need." More recently, American critic Donald Heiney wrote that in this one book, Vittorini "like Rabelais and Cervantes...adds a new artistic dimension to the history of literature."

Conversations in Sicily

London Magazine Editions

Men and Not Men

Henry, Sarah (translator)

Evanston, IL, U.S.A.: Marlboro Press, Incorporated, The, 1987

Marlboro Press

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