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The Watch: A Novel

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Carlo Levi (1902-1975) became a distinguished Italian journalist, writer, painter, and doctor, who is best known for his novel "Christ stopped at Eboli," unquestionably his masterpiece. Active in politics as a devoted socialist and antifascist he founded the resistance movement "Giustizia e Liberta." "The Watch" (L'orologio) is best classified as a political documentary novel, pertaining to the Neorealism of postwar Italian literature. Set in the desillusioned period after the war, it portrays a gallery of individuals (family, friends, partisans, and the commom people) all trying to cope and adjust to a new reality and the postwar Cabinet crisis in Rome. Levi foresaw a perpetuation under new slogans and new flags of the worst features of the tendency towards fascism, a culture of the "nostalgia." The heroism and sacrifice of partisan war faces a conservative reaction. Socialism has been a deception of history, the old structure is revived afer the war: the parasites (Luigini) feeding upon their hosts (Contadine), and the overall purpose is to restore the authority of the state. The partisans are blamed for pretending to reform a structure by preserving and restoring the very same structure they initially attempted to reform. The "watch" merely plays the role of a symbol, an attempt to fix an old time mechanism, which eventually is substituted by a similar one.

Besides its political tone, "The Watch" is characterized by an elegant prose and clearly denounces Carlo Levi as a painter, with characters and setting descriptions viewed from the perspective of an artist who is stroking his brush on a canvas.