SOURCE: Schwartz, Delmore. “The Miraculous Ayme and Others.” Partisan Review 18, no. 5 (September-October 1951): 575-81.

In the following review, Schwartz notes the lack of thematic unity in The Watch.

Many passages in Carlo Levi's The Watch have a wonderful eloquence, vividness, and vigor. Yet the book does not make a whole, and the reader finds himself in the middle of it making a fresh start again and again. This is partly due to the subject, which is panoramic and includes all of Italy soon after the second World War; and it is partly due to Levi's attitude toward his subject. He writes in the first person and in his own literal being as an Italian, a painter, and an author. But he holds back and refuses to involve himself in the subjectivity of personal revelation: at one point, he actually says of a relationship which he deliberately keeps hidden: “It...