[In the following review, Rugoff commends Levi's portrayal of the Sicilian people in Words Are Stones.]

Having interpreted southern Italy with extraordinary understanding in Christ Stopped at Eboli, it is not surprising that Carlo Levi should now turn to Sicily. Not that this small collection of reports and impressions is comparable to the earlier book. And yet at its best it displays the same remarkable capacity to see a people with all their past upon them—from the eras of Greek and Saracen, through generations of feudal lords, down to the Mafia-and-landowner rule of today—victim of a hundred wilful masters.

Perhaps that is why he opens his book with a piece about the return of Vincent Impellitteri—onetime Mayor of New York—to his native town of Isnello. Impellitteri embodied for the Sicilians who welcomed him the legend of an earthly Paradise where a poor shoemaker's son could become the head of a great city; and at the same time he pointed up the hopelessness of life in Sicily itself. The fact that Impellitteri never himself knew Isnello, having left it at the unripe age of one, or that he was a less than memorable public figure, only underscores the point, which is that as far as the average Sicilian was concerned he was a dream come true.

A second group of episodes revolves around Levi's visit to the sulphur mines in the Lercara district. On the one side he found the miners on strike for the first time in history, full of wonder at the feeling they had that they were human beings, and on the other side the mine owner, Signor N., like a baron in an old woodcut. As outworn a phenomenon as the mine owner, and an even more bizarre instance of Sicily's isolation, was the cemetery in a Capuchin monastery where, from 1559 to 1881, the bodies of thousands of Palermo's dead were embalmed and dressed in their finery, ranged along the walls of a labyrinthine catacomb.

Part II, devoted to the Catania, Taormina and Mt. Etna area, reminds us that Levi is a painter as well as a writer, for it creates with powerful strokes visions of an ancient Greek world dominated by a black volcanic god, of broad-faced peasant women “with large, long eyes like archaic statues,” of the “curved beach of Aci Trezza covered with painted boats,” of puppet plays in Catania that run in serial form for seventy-five evenings, of the luxuriant country-side around Bronte and the nightmarish poverty in the town itself.

But the most affecting section of the book is the last, which begins by explaining the Mafia as the inevitable result of a land of feudal estates and government from abroad, and then goes on to the story of a young peasánt, Salvatore Carnevale, who became a trade unionist and led the peasants of Sciara to challenge the feudal system and the Mafia terror. When he ignored both bribes and threats, the Mafia murdered him, ritualistically mutilated his face and held a banquet to celebrate the deed. Nominally the episode would have ended there. But Carnevale's mother refused to remain silent and, speaking out, broke, as it were an ancient spell, releasing the peasants from their captivity. Levi's account of how she first heard of the murder, ran to see if it was her son, and identified the body from the way the feet lay, is bare and terrible, full of antique Greek figures and gestures. In a single moment, as Levi describes it, the mother is transformed from a helpless peasant woman into an articulate, aware and implacable foe of the Mafia and the system, a woman for whom “tears are no longer tears but words, and words are stones.”