THE DARK AND THE LIGHT (182 pp.]Elio VittoriniNew Directions ($3.75).
One of these two short novels, La Garibaldina, chronicles a picaresque encounter on a Sicilian train after World War I between a simple, hearty young soldier, joyous at the prospect of a three-day leave home, and a lusty, waspish old baroness who is full of guile and as phony as her title. She is nicknamed La Garibaldina, because she used to be a camp follower in Italy's redshirt army of liberation in the 1860s, a career she has elaborated into her own self-nourishing legend...
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