After the Earthquake

Tim Parks

• BuyBitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone by Stanislao Pugliese
  Farrar, Straus, 426 pp, $35.00, June 2009, ISBN 978 0 374 11348 3

The life story of the Italian writer and political activist Secondino Tranquilli, alias Ignazio Silone, is both disquieting in itself and a serious challenge for anyone who believes that the value of a work of literature can be entirely separated in our minds from the character and behaviour of the person who produced it. Essentially, there are two versions of the Silone story. In the first he is an Orwell-like figure, a man who, following an idealistic commitment to Communism during the 1920s, reacted against its totalitarian inclinations and used his writing to promote freedom and democracy. In the second version, he was a police spy throughout his ten-year involvement with the Communist Party. In this account his repudiation of Communism was not, or not only, a matter of conviction but arose from his need to end a double life that had become too exhausting and too dangerous. The writing that followed allowed him to reconstruct his past and create an impression of courageous moral integrity.