[In the following excerpt, Swados offers a negative review of The Watch.]

The dust jacket of the new Carlo Levi volume describes it as “a new novel”, which is stretching the term out of recognition, for The Watch is a highly personal memoir of Levi's experiences over a brief period in the early days after the Liberation. If names have been changed, even if incidents have been rearranged and invented in order to dramatize the author's emotional reaction to the time when it looked as though Italy might really be reborn, that is hardly sufficient reason to charge Levi with having committed a novel. There are other criticisms that should be made of the manner in which The Watch has been presented. The anonymous translation, although occasionally rising to lyrical heights, seems to have been done in haste: “‘And why did you come back?’ asked Matteo with interest, who, as an old immigrant, looked on America as his second fatherland.” And while the publishers have mercifully spared us the fantastic collection of footnotes citing Stalin, Hemingway, Veblen, and 123 others which appeared in the Italian edition, they have not attempted to cut the text itself, which in this case is a pity; for The Watch is as undisciplined as a writer's private journal. Description after minute description of the noses, chins, eyes, and ears of passersby who have no connection with the narrative other than their momentary impingement on Levi's consciousness are excellent as practice notations but almost disastrous in an ambitious work like The Watch.

Levi's intoxication with his own prose does more than slow the pace of his narrative. It obscures his major design, a philosophic and poetic conception of the passage of time as illustrated by his own symbolic experiences in 1946; and most important, it conceals those really beautiful passages which disclose with charm and vivacity not only the author, but Italy as well. If it were possible to compress this volume to such scenes as the midnight discussions of the young journalist-intellectuals, the frantic bus ride from Rome to Naples with a brigand firing wildly through the windows, the encounter with a corpse in the corridor of a palace-roominghouse, the tour through a hideous rat-conquered Roman slum with a brilliantly sketched lovesick composer in search of his lost mistress—then we might have a work of permanence and stature. As it is, The Watch is by turns thrilling and exasperating, graceful and tedious. It makes one wonder whether Levi, whose gifts are equal to those of almost any other European, will ever succeed in harnessing his furious talents to the precise demands of an art form with architectural as well as pictorial elements.