One Hit, Two Misses

THE WATCH (442 pp.)--Carlo Levi--Farrar, Straus & Young ($3.75).

Italy's postwar literary comeback was sparked in 1945 by Carlo Levi, a stocky ex-physician who prefers to be known as a painter. His Christ Stopped at Eboli (TIME, May 5, 1947), a prizewinning bestseller, was a vivid picture of life in the starving south Italian town to which Levi was exiled by Mussolini in 1935. His second book, Of Fear and Freedom, a rambling philosophical essay on man's fate, was as diffuse and shapeless as Eboli was graceful and compact.

Levi's latest book, The Watch, is a flashback to Rome just after the liberation. Based mainly on Levi's actual experiences (many prominent Italians are said to be vaguely recognizable in its pages), The Watch bobbles along without story line or character development. More than anything else, it is a series of literary angle shots of a great world capital, disorganized and politically adrift. The street scenes--Rome's open black market, the shooting of a Fascist informer by a partisan in broad daylight--read as though they had been planned as paintings, full of sensuous color and clear visual images. Here & there, The Watch has patches of writing as good as anything in Eboli. But its pace is slowed by irrelevant incidents and by tedious, pointless speeches on Italian politics. Few books have so sorely needed a firm editor.

The Watch is at its readable best when it describes people and places: poverty-stricken slum dwellers in a Rome suburb, a garrulous waiter, fellow passengers on an auto trip to Naples, the palace where he lived in Rome, with a staircase so spacious that G.I.s drove up & down it in their jeeps. These are bits & pieces, some of them very good, but they cannot make a book and they do not begin to make a novel. At 48, Carlo Levi is still the middling painter who wrote Christ Stopped at Eboli.

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