Italian Earnestness

A HANDFUL OF BLACKBERRIES (314 pp.) --Ignazio Si lone--Harper ($3.50).

Ignazio Silone is an Italian idealist who has spent a good part of a lifetime alternating between books and politics; the constant thing about Silone is that he has always been for the persecuted against the persecutors, as Ignazio Silone saw them. In his 20s he was a Communist, hopping back & forth between Stalin's Moscow and the underground in Mussolini's Italy. By his 303 he had seen enough of both totalitarianisms; he settled down in free Switzerland, wrote his famed novels of the Italian peasantry, Fontamara and Bread and Wine. After World War II, he went home to Italy, won a following in Italian politics as an anti-Communist Socialist. A Handful of Blackberries is his first novel to appear in the U.S. in more than a decade. Novelist Silone, 53, is still against persecutors.

His scene is a barren mountain area in southern Italy; the time, just after the liberation. Rocco de Donatis, the local Communist leader, is growing death-tired of party lines. "You have the sadness," an old woman tells him, "of one who set out to go very far and ends up by finding himself where he began. Didn't they teach you at school that the world is round?"

When a Communist troubleshooter, sent down from Rome, asks him why he refuses to speak in public any more, Rocco tells him that, the last few times, he has had a terrifying experience: "While I was speaking, I could hear my own voice as though it belonged to someone else. It never happens when I'm saying what I think." Rocco quits the party.

His mistress Stella hangs on in the party, trying to help the leaders bring Rocco back. But when she is asked to hunt for some damaging "false documents," Stella wonders if the manuscripts really lie. The party man sets her straight; "You know the infallible criterion of the Party: anything that harms Russia is false."

"So those documents would be false even if--I'm just saying this--they happened to be true?"

"Of course. Especially if they were true."

Stella leaves the party, too, and marries Rocco. And Rocco continues to fight for what he has always fought for while the Communists attempt by lies and persecution to force the two of them into exile. At the end, Rocco is still hanging on, still fighting for social justice--"next year, or 60, or even 2,000 years from now."

Novelist Silone has not lost his talent for making simple people speak simple, barbed truths. Although his novel will be too earnest for stylists, it is a rewarding one. And it is heated with the warmth of Ignazio Silone's human kindness.

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