The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone.(Book Review)

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-APR-05

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COPYRIGHT 2005 Modern Humanities Research Association

The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone. By ELIZABETH LEAKE. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2003. viii + 200 pp. 32 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-8020-8767-1.

This study of Ignazio Silone's earliest fictional works,hiaggio a Parigi, Fontamara, and Pane e vino, is the first to adopt wholeheartedly the view that Silone informed on his Communist comrades for the Fascists throughout the 1920s. Leake's psychoanalytical reading aims to show how Silone 'reinvented' his supposedly duplicitous past; she presents his writing primarily as a cover-up operation that allowed him both to disguise and to confess his betrayal. Sandwiching her literary analysis between introductory and concluding chapters on the informer debate, Leake does not advance any new evidence on the nature or motivation of Silone's contacts with Fascism and no...

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