[In the following review, Hughes asserts that The Watch “is one of the most beautiful nostalgic works to have come out of Europe recently.”]

Carlo Levi's new book will never vie with his first novel, Christ Stopped at Eboli, in popularity. It appeals to a more limited number of readers. Where the first novel was brilliantly successful in conveying a fresh poetical interpretation of Italy's perennial problem, the problem of the South, and all of Levi's vision was focused on one place and one people, this second novel lacks both the intensity and the freshness of theme of the first. And the moods of the two works are so different! Whatever one may think of some of the political reasoning of Levi in Christ Stopped at Eboli, it was a hopeful vision he had. It was a very young book which looked to the future and had a warmth and a vitality to it. The Watch, instead, is nostalgic, it is mellow, and it does not look to any future but meditates on disillusionment. It is one of the most beautiful nostalgic works to have come out of Europe recently.

It may appear to some that in this instance Levi indulges too much in ideas, that he is flirting with the novel of ideas, but he is not. He uses ideas as he uses his images. His ideas are remarkable for their suggestiveness, their sparkle, but they are more fantastic than cerebral relationships. Perhaps the beauty of Levi's art lies in knowing how to envision fantastic ideas.

The story—no—the incident, for that is what this really is, describes Levi's stay in Rome, where he had gone to take over a newspaper after the end of the war, and continues up to the time of the fall of the Parri government. It is the tale of the failure, according to Levi, of all those groups who fought Fascism and who were united for one splendid moment in Partisan activities, to remain united for peace and so bring about radical innovations in government.

But Levi does not simply describe that time; he shuttles back and forth from the present, and he does so splendidly. The book is not really at all Proustian, as some have claimed, because the center is always the present and everything always returns to it. Levi's past never becomes an attractive labyrinth in which one may lose onesself but only a place in which occasionally to rest.

The imagery retains those sharp surrealistic touches at which Levi is a master. It is a constantly new imagery, fresh, which takes old experiences and transforms them. Levi's eyes transform the most common market scene, the most habitual café talk, the most routine places and things. That is the beauty of his style, that he always places the object at an unaccustomed angle and makes us see it as something new. The sky of Rome, for instance, unlike the sky of London and Paris, is “rich, dense, crowded with baroque clouds full of changing curves that rest on homes, churches and palaces like a fantastic dome the wind wraps up and turns around.”