[In the following review, Keene provides a laudatory assessment of The Watch and views it within the context of Levi's oeuvre.]

First of all, of course, this isn't a novel, as the jacket and its blurb would have you believe. It would be a mistake to expect Levi to construct, out of historical incident and personal experience, a technically acceptable work of fiction. So let's get the idea out of the way that The Watch even pretends to be a novel, complete with plot, sub-plot and, if possible, love interest. Then perhaps we can talk fairly about the book.

It is, instead, a prolonged meditation upon one moment in recent history. Levi's work has always had to do with man in relation to the historical moment, and the present book gives it continuity and cumulative force. He is a writer animated by a clinical interest in his fellow-man, but unlike many clinicians, he has also great love for his fellows. It is not the kind of love which breeds false values or the eternal sentimentalities of men who “mean well.” It is the love of a good doctor, which Levi was trained to be, the doctor who knows when merely to advise, when to cut and stitch, even when to prescribe the death draft.

This loving man, this writer who is piling up human and personal documents in his books, has chosen to record—of all the incidents he has witnessed in the event-packed last years—one moment in time which was to some the most searing and shattering, and therefore the most symbolic of all—the fall of the Parri (Resistance) government in Italy in 1946. The importance of this moment was that for so many it spelled the end of hope. Not only for Italy but for Western Europe, the coup d'état sealed a kind of doomed return to the status quo ante and, specifically in Italy, to clericalism and Giolittian impotence.

In the lacerating and beautiful chapters which describe the government crisis and the last press conference of the ousted leader, Levi writes: “The Premier, the fallen Premier whom they wanted either to support or replace, did not fly in the sky [of politics], nor did he even turn to look at it. He walked over a small earth, and did not want to know and see anything but … the faces and hands of all those he met on his way. He stopped to talk with them, forgetting everything else, and he wept for their tears.”

Opposing this “exotic and courageous” man, Levi aligns not only the other party leaders who maneuvered him out of office but the multitude of inert, malevolent, and sycophantic office-holders who “would no longer have to tremble at the idea of crazy reforms, senseless changes, cruel purges, and ridiculous demands for efficiency, [who] would no longer need to greet superiors who didn't hesitate to humiliate them by rejecting the title ‘Your Excellency,’ so sweet on the lips.” There you have the duality between real and false, between sincere and conventionally bland and faceless, which is the prime element of the book.

This symbolic dichotomy appears again in a notable and intensely credible discussion between two fellow-editors and the author in which one of the former divides all men into producers, Contadini (“peasants” in the sense of those who make real things grow), and parasites, Luigini (“gentlemen” whose only claim to survival is their genuine passion for a bite, even a small bite, of authority).

Hammering this theme in its various aspects on page after page, Levi yet manages never to make The Watch a bitter book. It has the gentle, rolling, and engulfing warmth of mulled wine, as if the author partook a little, despite his Piedmontese origin, of the Neapolitan sense of timelessness, which he describes as a “world that had already lived out its time in its own eternal and unchangeable law and that, in that ancient and sorrowful world, people considered themselves nothing but an ephemeral ornament, a transient expression, and yet were putting all their good-will into adorning it … contemplating their own swift passage through it without illusion.”

This acceptance by the author of the inevitability of loss, of disillusion, of political but not moral defeat, never implies fecklessness. Levi calmly mentions at one point his own inertia, which is manifest everywhere in his inability, once started on a descriptive passage or a summoned scene of memory (childhood in Turin, the rout attending the fall of France, a moment in the prison of Le Mantellate when the owls were spied on a nearby roof), to cut it short. But his recorded thought and known anti-totalitarian action attest the fact that his convictions have shaken him loose often enough. He knows whereof he speaks when he describes that army of “men and women [who] went about on the streets of the world, driven into a time which was not their own.”

This brings us to the device, arbitrary and baroque but valid, of the watch from which these rambling, meditative memoirs take their name. The writer presents us in his first pages with a Kafkaesque watch, the heirloom given to the son by his father upon his emergence into still-fumbling adolescent sentience and standing clearly for some sort of ordered, upper-middle-class continuity of intellectual and social ideas. Levi's meditations begin with his inherited watch, which is first broken in a dream and then, on his waking, in sober fact.

The symbol is never obtrusive, and it starts us off. We then follow the author in his personal hegira to have the watch fixed, hence to his job as editor of L'Italia Libera (the Action Party daily), and on to press conference and printer's, including excursions outside the straight narrative of the political events of those days yet related to them by implication. And everywhere the spiritual and physical climate of Rome in those days follows us. In the end, the watch of Levi's adolescence—broken, we are led to believe, beyond repair—is replaced by another bequest, this time from an uncle, a doctor, a “sage,” who transmitted it to him on his deathbed through the hands of a toil-worn peasant woman, representative of the loyalties and stubbornness of the contadini at their resistant best.

But there is too much of everything in the book, as if, pouring his hot wine with a steady and generous hand, the author did not, literally, know when to stop. Especially is this true of the overblown Naples passage, in which everything of fact and legend which has meaning for our time comes popping, page on page, before our eyes, until at a certain moment, as if to protect the best of the book against this engulfing flood of scenes, words and more words, we wish to cry stop. But despite such defects of proportion, the book has communicable and convincing greatness.

There are a few lame passages which do not ring or move in English, but on the whole the translation is honest and good. Levi's prose pattern, ornate, swollen with pregnant associative adjectives, with convoluted allegorical and prophetic imagery, is more closely followed in this translation than in any American edition of his other books.

To add spice for the initiate of any nationality, there are the painter's vignettes of De Gasperi, Togliatti, Cianca, Croce (in the dream sequence), and a host of other painters, writers, editors, men of politics, who paraded across the Italian scene in the immediate post-war years.

The Watch is intimately related to Levi's other work. The chronological order of the books, if I recall, places Fear of Freedom first (for reasons of prior copyright, this title, the correct translation of the French and Italian title, could not be used in English). Levi's contention that this fear is at the root of man's inability to direct his destiny to a morally more acceptable end is given empirical evidence in his first narrative, Christ Stopped at Eboli. Therein the fear and its resultant duality are exemplified in the infinite capacity of man to visit repressive and ignorant cruelty on his fellows. In the present work the author takes us one step farther and confronts man with a moment of choice—in Christ Stopped at Eboli there was no choice possible. The recorded moment is that of “the last chance.” But even among the Contadini, the morally saved or salvageable, there are those who “turn toward peace with such intensity that they refuse to defend it”: fear of the responsibilities of freedom engulfs the moment, and it is gone. This inability to choose, to distinguish with any certainty between the real and the unreal, which Levi saw in his snatched moment of history, when all hopes for a true resurgence of the progressive forces were dashed, is the bleak, tragic pageant The Watch records.

At a time when man's concern with himself has shut him progressively away from the other selves who make up his world, it is a healthy experience to come on a subjective and personal work so teeming with awareness of the world about one, an “I” book so human, so honestly thought through, and so vast.