Conversations In Sicily - Softcover

Vittorini, Elio

3.72

2,997 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1841953881 ISBN 13: 9781841953885

Publisher: Canongate Books, 2003

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Particularly reminiscent of Knut Hamsun's great novel Hunger, Conversations in Sicily is a strange, paradoxical work that echoes the existentialist concerns of Camus' fiction while capturing vividly the heat and sounds and smells of southern Italy. The novel begins at a time in the unnamed narrator's life when nothing seems to matter. He is filled with a deep sense of ennui and feels disconnected from all that surrounds him. That is until he embarks on a journey to Sicily, the home he has not seen in some fifteen years. Alane Mason's new translation succeeds wonderfully in bringing this evocative and brilliant novel alive. It is a superb work of fiction, one of the great novels of anti-fascism and a book that is sure to astound contemporary readers for its modernity, lyricism, originality and freshness

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

Superbly written ... Vittorini's unique prose laps against one in repetitious wavelets, alive to the rhythm and significance of language in a way more common to poetry than to prose.

Praised in the past by writers like Ernest Hemingway and Italo Calvino, this new translation by Alane Mason restores a paint-fresh vividness to a classic novel, too-little known in the English speaking world.

" (Wayne Burrows)

"Vittorini is one of the very best . . . I care very much about his ability to bring rain with him when he comes, if the earth is dry and that is what you need." (Ernest Hemingway)

"It is very hard to give any adequate sense of [its] power, rendered in lucid, supple lines of almost Homeric simplicity whose cadences are faithfully captured in this excellent new translation" (Guardian)

"An extraordinary book ... For anyone interested in memory and place, the loss of the past and the attempt to recover it in words, this book will be rewarding ... giving the reader an experience that is vividly new, yet strangely familiar" (Kirsty Gunn)

Book Description:

Vividly capturing the heat, sounds and smells of southern Italy, Conversations in Sicily astounds with its modernity, lyricism and originality

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.