Customer Reviews

Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone

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One of the characters in Ignazio Silone's L'avventura di un povero cristiano says that the thirst for power is even more powerful than the sexual instinct, because, he adds, "I have known many chaste persons who could not resist the temptation of power". The character was Celestino V, the only pope who ever abdicated from the papacy, and who knew quite a few things about power (and chastity). This is the biography of a man who resisted the temptations of power, a biography that is well written, very interesting and clever (if you wish to have a good laugh, read the story of the devil and the school boys). Silone's first book, Fontamara (which, by the way, translates as Bitter Spring in English) was one of the most powerful accusations ever made against Fascism, and this at a time when Fascism and Nazism were triumphant. It is the biography of a man who fought for the poor, and when you read this biography, you should disregard the poat-mortem accusations (it is vile to accuse a dead person when he/she can no longer defend himself). Silone was the conscience of socialism, and the socialist parties in Italy would do better at the elections if they had the conscience of Silone.

I really enjoyed reading this book about the founder of the Italian Communist Party, ignazio Silone as I think that his run in with Stalin shows the problems with a one party, one leader rule that is particularly important for America now as we have so many television stations (ABC, MSNBC) dedicated to only presenting the official view.

As a biography I had a lot of respect for this man, "a Christian with no Church, a communist with no party" and I found myself surprisingly agreeing with alot of his beliefs and stands. While Silone may be no Patrick Henry, author of "Give me liberty or Give me death" I think his views and literature are as important particularly in these statist days. I enjoyed the book greatly and am going to read some of Silone's books as well...I think I could learn a lot and this biography is a great introduction.

By Ray Moseley (London, UK)
His name is unknown to many of the current generation, but Ignazio Silone was one of the great Italian writers of the twentieth century and deserves far better than the relative oblivion to which he has been assigned. Not only are his greatest novels, Bread and Wine and Fontamara, moving and still relevant accounts of life under Fascist dictatorship, but Silone's own life has a distinctly novelistic quality: Survivor of a deadly earthquake in his teens, a self-educated man of humble origins, a Christian disillusioned with formal Christianity, a founding member of the Italian Communist Party later expelled from its ranks, a man imprisoned, self-exiled and later accused of collaboration with Fascist police. More than all that, an enigmatic personality difficult for a biographer to delineate. Stanislao Pugliese has risen to the challenge and brought this rather ignored writer back to our attention with a vivid, compelling, and well-researched biography, the first in English and a book that deserves to be widely read. I can only hope it will stimulate many people unfamiliar with Silone's work to discover what they have been missing.