Master Italian Stylist

...The first, "Erica," which appeared in 1936, is a lyrical tour de force which explores the terrifying but magic inner life of adolescence with its special amalgam of real and imagined terrors...

...But these devices, passed through the crucible of Vittorini's profoundly original mind, have been fused into a new form and substance...

...She quietly puts a red ribbon in her hair and, by taking soldiers up to her garret room while the children are at school, earns enough to ward off starvation...

...It begins on a frankly realistic note...

...La Garibaldina," a taut, exciting, at times surrealistic story written in 1950, reveals a radical change in both pace and outlook...

...This book makes clear why such writers as Kay Boyle still consider Vittorini "the most exciting voice now speaking from Italy...

...Here again, the protagonist is humble and naive: A young soldier on a three-day pass trying to get to his native village...

...These stories, published at an interval of 15 years, provide the reader with two divergent but deeply significant aspects of Vittorini's technique and approach...

...A Sicilian by birth, he—like other modern Sicilian writers such as Giovanni Verga, Luigi Pirandello, Giuseppe Borgese and Salvatore Quasimodo —has not only transcended his region but also his country, and has emerged as an important figure on the stage of world writing...

...During the course of the endless night ride the youth, happy in his posh surroundings, yields to the encroaching sleep of adolescence while "the old girl," as he nicknames her, consumed by the insomniac curiosity of the aging, plies him with pointed questions...

...abrupt transitions from speech to thought and vice versa) which may seem less traditionally Italian than trans-oceanic...

...Then, suddenly, everything falls back into focus and the sense of light, order and reality is fully restored...

...Reviewed by HELENE CANTARELLA Contributor, "Atlantic Monthly," New York "Times Book Review Section" Elio Vittorini, not a prolific writer by any standard, nonetheless remains one of Italy's most vital and influential novelists...

...No two stories could better illustrate this point than the novellas in The Dark and the Light, the fourth of Vittorini's books to appear in the United States...

...Bit by bit she extracts his melancholy story and then embarks on her own bit of history...

...Too young to find normal work when she runs out of supplies and money, Erica decides to settle for the only "work" she can get...

...Yet, it is not a dismal story at all...

...Born in 1908, Vittorini began his career during the censor-ridden days of Fascism...

...The children become fair game for the neighbors, who pilfer from the little store of coal, corn meal, oil and canned meat that their mother has left behind...

...It is to Vittorini's remarkable gifts as a translator and stylist that these writers owe their fame in Italy, where "the Americans" became synonymous with avant-garde writing in the late '20s and '30s...

...Unable to publish his own works, he sought intellectual refuge in translating "the Americans"—Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck...

...The whole story is geared to a recurrent Vittorini symbol—a train ride...

...That Vittorini is indebted particularly to Hemingway and Faulkner is undeniable...

...But it would be a mistake to consider him derivative...

...Frances Keene's translation, done con amore, conveys with sensitivity and dramatic eloquence the haunting qualities of Vittorini's style, a compound of humor, compassion and myth...

...Little by little the quixotic characters take over completely until the action reaches a dramatic and ominous climax...

...Set in the teeming tenement courtyard of a large Northern Italian industrial city slum, it is a somber story of unemployment, destitution and despair...

...At his age she had been a camp follower of Garibaldi and had lived to the hilt the heady adventures of the Risorgimento...

...He uses certain literary devices (rhythmic cadences, skeletal dialogue with studied omissions of irrelevant words or of whole sentences...

...For the author, whose father was a stationmaster in Sicily, trains seem a sort of lifeline that link insular man to the continent, first as an escape route from, and later as a return to, the security of the matrix, the homeland...

...The only train he can take is a first-class car which transports only the local notables...

...The boy only half believes what she has to say...

...patterns of repetition and suspension...

...But at dawn, as he is about to deposit the woman and her heavy bags at her villa gate, she gives proof of her indomitable spirit by singlehandedly rescuing him from an angry mob of work-hungry migratory workers who threaten to vent their blind rancor against him...

...Seen through Erica's eyes, the vicissitudes of her tragic young life glow with rare poetic fantasy...

...He is befriended by a vivid and eccentric noblewoman on her way back to her estates...

...Left to fend for herself at the age of 14 when her mother goes north to join her father who has at last found work, Erica happily cares for her younger brother and sister, oblivious in her new-found freedom to the hardships in store for them...