[In the following review, Match derides the lack of characterization in The Watch.]

On page 68 of The Watch, Carlo Levi (speaking through one of his characters) expresses an opinion about Tolstoy. I quote it here because I think it tells what Levi himself was trying to do in The Watch.

“Tolstoy,” says Levi, “was not a novelist. The huge machines that he used carried him who knows where, but his true value was a different one. … He is the poet of the unique instant, which cannot last nor repeat itself nor change … outside of time, outside of every novel … fixed and intense … beyond story-telling. … He's like the great impressionist painters. And like the impressionists, he doesn't need to tell a story or paint historical pictures. All he needs to do is to catch, once and for all, an instant that will never come back, that has no before nor after.”

Whether or not the foregoing shoe fits Tolstoy comfortably, it most assuredly fits Carlo Levi, accomplished painter, physician, and perhaps more than any other living writer, “the poet of the unique instant.” His new book is neither more nor less than a thousand such instants, magically caught, seen and remembered by a painter's eye in the postwar cities of Rome and Naples. And the sum of those brilliant visual images is the recreation of a unique instant in Italian history: the passing of the postwar Resistance movement, and with it, says Levi sadly, the end of the only peasant revolution Italy ever had.

Levi's blurb writer professes to feel that all these unique instants add up to a novel, in spite of the fact that, collectively, they have no plot, no form, no continuity and no active central character. While the matter of classification is secondary, most readers will disagree with the blurbist. It is my own feeling that no book can be a novel of consequence unless it creates full-scale characters.

This The Watch does not do. It is alive, literally teeming, with quick word-pictures of people—waiters, journalists, cabinet ministers, black marketeers, beggars, prostitutes, policemen—but it rarely sees inside anyone. Like a painter looking at his model, Levi sees colors and shapes the rest of us might miss, but he keeps his distance.

Although the “I” of this book appears to be the same man who lived through Christ Stopped at Eboli (i.e., Levi himself), he remains this time almost entirely the self-effacing narrator, the passive receiver of impressions. Those impressions of crumbling palazzos and ghastly slums, febrile mob scenes and moonlit colonnades, glitter as vividly as any descriptive writing I have ever read. But they remain just that, brilliant descriptive writing, until the narrator does something on his own.

In the last quarter of the book, Levi embarks on a journey to Naples. The sprawling canvas narrows down to nine assorted Italians crammed into an ancient taxicab, the wordy philosophizing and time symbolism of the earlier sections disappear, and the central personality that unified Eboli emerges again, wise and strong and tender.