Books: 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....