Ferdinando Camon

Each new generation makes its own inquiry into the meaning of life, but never more so in recent years has the search for something to do with oneself led young people into extreme, violent, and contradictory experiences. In the Story of Sirio Camon constructs a parable where the young heroes are shown advancing through the successive phases of a typical via crucis: here we see the middle class boy at home, enveloped in the middle class dream, and invited to put his life into the service of production and expression; here he is a runaway from home and living in the other world of society's rebels; here we see him enter into the world of romantic love; and here into the artifical paradise of drugs. And finally we see him, now part of an encounter group made up of his peers, undertaking that painful and grave effort at self-analysis, that effort to know oneself which, for Camon, must precede any meaningful effort at social revolution. Each new period must rewrite its Siddhartha, redraft its educational and inspirational handbook for the new generation. The Story of Sirio may be that book for the period we have just emerged from and for the other that is opening now.

This novel is the third part of the celebrated trilogy Camon called "the cycle of the lowliest," which traced one of the most important but least recognized events of modern history: the death of Italy's peasant civilization. Camon's northern Italy was primitive and poor; little more than strong religious beliefs helped to sustain the populace through years of poverty, hunger, and disease. With the arrival of the "civilizing" aspects of modern life, however, the peasant way of life, and all it stood for, changed forever. Memorial is the final installment in Camon's attempt to capture and immortalize the ageless peasant world. The first two books in the trilogy, The Fifth Estate and Life Everlasting, are also available from The Marlboro Press/Northwestern.

In conversations in Turin from 1982 to 1986, "Levi spoke of the war, of anti-Semitism, of the camps, of the German guilt, of the emergence of Israel, and of his own extraordinary life and his extraordinary work."--Cover.