[In the following review, Schwartz notes the lack of thematic unity in The Watch.]

Many passages in Carlo Levi's The Watch have a wonderful eloquence, vividness, and vigor. Yet the book does not make a whole, and the reader finds himself in the middle of it making a fresh start again and again. This is partly due to the subject, which is panoramic and includes all of Italy soon after the second World War; and it is partly due to Levi's attitude toward his subject. He writes in the first person and in his own literal being as an Italian, a painter, and an author. But he holds back and refuses to involve himself in the subjectivity of personal revelation: at one point, he actually says of a relationship which he deliberately keeps hidden: “It is a true story, too true for me to want to talk about it, or to be able to talk about it; at least until I am so old that the words will come out of my mouth like stones.” And this refusal is matched by an equal unwillingness to commit his perceptions to the process and the order of a genuine narrative, an unwillingness which may be an aspect of Levi's complete fidelity and exactitude, but with the result that much of his book occupies some undefined middle ground. At times, it is the journal or diary of a human being of the greatest sensitivity and awareness; and at other times, the experience which is being reported transforms itself, such is its intensity and meaningfulness, into scenes which have the inexhaustible implications of true fiction.

Levi does make an effort to impose a unity upon his heterogeneous material in the figure of the uncle, Luca, and in the symbol of the watch. Luca is the wise man who has given the protagonist a vision of existence which arrives at affirmation through and after knowledge, and which leads to a sense that old age may bring with it increasing joy and truth. But convincing though he is in himself, Luca does not pull together the other episodes, characters, and events in a dramatic generalization. He remains like the others an intermittent figure who appears, is forgotten, reappears and is forgotten again. Levi's essential point of view is that of a bemused and helpless spectator who loves and suffers with the beings he looks upon, and yet cannot come very close to them. Sometimes he feels he is moving about Italy like Jonah in the belly of the whale; sometimes “I sat on the iron seat like a spectator who happens to be in a theater by pure chance,” and at such times he regards the Premier making a speech and this shy man looks to him like a chrysanthemum on a dung heap; and frequently at other times, he moves in a setting in which “the streets were deserted and my footsteps resounded from the façades and the courtyards like blows hitting a hollow body,” an image evoking the early Chirico. This very ambiguity and shifting and uncertainty of the narrator's role makes for the sharpness and genuineness of a good many passages, but it also makes the book not a single experience mounting in meaning, but a set of experiences superficially connected and actually separate and disparate and without a truly illuminating relationship to each other. Nevertheless the power and the beauty of certain pages are so great, and the capacity for the assimilation of experience so comprehensive that one concludes with the feeling that this may be the kind of a book which, knowingly or unknowingly, has been written as the preparation for a masterpiece.