SOURCE: Swados, Harvey. “Fiction of Three Countries.” Hudson Review 4, no. 3 (autumn 1951): 467-70.

In the following excerpt, Swados offers a negative review of The Watch.

The dust jacket of the new Carlo Levi volume describes it as “a new novel”, which is stretching the term out of recognition, for The Watch is a highly personal memoir of Levi's experiences over a brief period in the early days after the Liberation. If names have been changed, even if incidents have been rearranged and invented in order to dramatize the author's emotional reaction to the time when it looked as though Italy might really be reborn, that is hardly sufficient reason to charge Levi with having committed a novel. There are other criticisms that should be made of the manner in which The Watch has been presented. The anonymous translation, although occasionally rising to lyrical heights, seems to have been done...