Levi wrote the story Christ Stopped at Eboli as a memoir. The cause was his arrest as an activist and his exile to Lucania, Italy in the 1930’s. Despite the title, it’s not religious writing. The theme of the book is about the vastness of the place and the remoteness of the area. So remote in Italy that not even Christ bothered to go that far out of His way; he went no further than Eboli. It was meant to portray Levi’s loneliness, his ties cut from the civilised world and his helplessness at the situation.
The memoir is Levi’s observations of the poor peasants of Lucania, the corruption of politicians and the machinations of bureaucracy.
Toward the end, he says, “There will always be an abyss between the State and the peasants, whether the State be Fascist, Liberal, Socialist…we can bridge the abyss only when we succeed in creating a government in which the peasants feel they have some share…just as long as Rome controls our local affairs and wields the power of life and death over us we shall go on like dumb animals.”
He hopes for a government “neither Fascist, nor Communist, nor even Liberal, for all three of these are forms of the religion of the State. Instead, the individual must be made the basis of the State, not the other way around. If not, the “ill advised intentions of the State” prevent the peasants from feeling they participate and poverty and deserts result.
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