Cure for Silvestro

IN SICILY (163 pp.)--Elio Vittorini--New Directions ($2.50).

"If there is any rhetoric or fancy writing that puts you off at the beginning or the end," says Ernest Hemingway in his introductory puff to this novel of Italy in the '30s, "just ram through it." Hemingway is wrong in his warning about where the "rhetoric" is to be found--it comes in the middle, and in cascades--but his advice is still worth taking.

In Sicily is the story of a 29-year-old linotype operator named Silvestro Ferrauto, who is bored to death with himself, his daily routine and everything else in his town. Nothing seems to matter. That, thinks Silvestro, is "the terrible part . . . to believe mankind to be doomed, and yet to feel no fever to save if, but instead to nourish a desire to succumb with it."

On an impulse, Silvestro buys a ticket to his mother's village in Sicily. When he gets there, his mother is roasting a fish and the smell releases a lot of memories: how his mother's face had once been "young and awe-inspiring"; how, in poverty, they had dined on snails and endives, and relished them; how Silvestro's grandfather, a good Socialist, had also been a good enough Catholic to ride in the St. Joseph's Day parade. When his mother takes Silvestro on her rounds as a practical nurse, Silvestro begins to learn his lesson: there is more than enough doom and misery to go around and man's glory is that he does not give in to them. The knowledge makes him feel much better.

Up to this point, In Sicily is an excellent novel about the same kind of simple and appealing people that Ignazio Silone (Bread and Wine, The Seed Beneath the Snow) writes about--all done in a clipped Hemingwayesque style. But just about midway, Novelist Vittorini goes off on a wild-swinging tear into symbolism which is part sentimentality, part hallucination. His characters begin to chant lugubrious dirges about the "world's outrages" that sound as if they had been written by William Saroyan with an ice pack on his head.

Vittorini partially redeems all this by a quiet ending: Silvestro and his mother mutely discover their buoying devotion to each other. After all, she says shyly, "it makes one happy to talk to one's son, after 15 years . . ." And Silvestro, who has rediscovered compassion, thereby rediscovers man's strength.

Author Vittorini, who was a Fascist in his youth, wrote In Sicily in 1937, when he was in the process of becoming a Communist. That may explain the midsection rhetoric. Only a fine natural gift explains the rest--and the best--of his story.

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