[In the following review, Secondari comments on Levi's distance from his subject matter and the lack of facts in Words Are Stones.]

As a prophet is least attended in his own home, Carlo Levi is less thought of in Italy than abroad. Certainly much less in Italy than in the United States, where his reputation rests solidly on the impact and success of his wartime Christ Stopped at Eboli. That was possibly the first book to pull back the curtain from the tragic, desert-like, dusty world of the Southern Italian peasant, and allow a foreign audience to peek. It was only after the war that the Italian Communists made the conditions of the Southern Italian peasant and land reform twin subjects generally familiar to the world at large.

Words Are Stones deals with that same world. It is about Sicily, and the fantastically beautiful sea which now is almost completely empty of fish. It describes that ancient life, a mixture of Arab and Greek, Spanish and Norman, and a little bit of Italian. It pictures the golden coast and the barren interior, where peasants live and die where they are born, never even finding out what lies on the other side of the mountain. It tells of the slowly changing world which is—in one of its aspects—substituting trucks for the painted Sicilian carts. All this Mr. Levi does.

He deals with the social aspects of this tragic land, and the hopeless lives of the peasants. He writes of the feudal estates and the Mafia (which, he says, enforces the law of the estate) and of the Italian police who look on and allow the terror and the murders which are the Mafia's tools. He does this at length in the third part of the book, which reports the murder of a peasant Communist organizer in a village in Sicily.

To an extent, Mr. Levi also considers the social value of things Sicilian when, in another part of the book, he reports the visit of then mayor of New York, Vincent Impellitteri, to his native village in Sicily. The comment lies in a note of wonder at the almost divine value which the villagers placed on this son of theirs who had traveled so far and risen so high. But Mr. Levi's wonder is counterpointed by the vein of his personal contempt that people should believe that there was anything extraordinary in what Mr. Impellitteri had been industrious enough, smart enough, lucky enough to achieve in his life. Above all, the contempt that the people who believe this should be these tragic people of Sicily, whose backward lives he has chosen to champion for a change to the better.

To this reader, it is a note which, once discerned in this first part of the three-part book, cannot but be noticed elsewhere in the pages. Mr. Levi does not feel himself one of the peasants; he says so quite frankly. He merely observes them, and writes about them. One has the impression he does not understand them. And Mr. Levi's observations are brief indeed, for he tells in the introduction that each of his visits preceding the writing of the book lasted no more than two days.

Which raises the point of how this book should be judged. Certainly not as a report, since it is admittedly too shallow in research for a report. Essentially it is not a political pamphlet, though there are overtones of politics, as there are in everything Mr. Levi writes. Then perhaps as a travelogue, written in a language somewhat more readable than Baedeker.

From the title one imagines that Mr. Levi intended every word to be a stone cast against the complacent lack of interest of the Italian government in Rome. In English the words are more bread crumbs than stones. In Italian they could hardly carry any more weight, because it is not words that are stones, but facts, and this book lacks facts.

And there may lie the explanation of why Mr. Levi is more highly regarded here than in his own country—because in Italy the people who read his books are also acquainted with the facts.