Blood & Justice

THE BRIGAND (224 pp.) -- GiuseppeBerto--New Directions ($2.75).

U.S. fiction may be in the doldrums, but good novels continue to come out of postwar Italy. The latest, and one of the best, is The Brigand, a tragic story of an army veteran who tries to play Robin

Hood for the poor peasants of his village but succeeds only in bringing misery to them and death to himself. A striking improvement over Berto's first novel, The Sky Is Red (TIME, Oct. 25, 1948), The Brigand shines with the kind of love for the Italian peasant that characterizes Ignazio Silone's novels._It is a tone of love which almost never finds its way into U.S. writing.

Lordly Arrogance. When Michele Rende comes home, a veteran of the African campaign, the wretched villagers of Grupa immediately fear and admire him, though they do not know why. But there is a lordliness and arrogance in the gait of the man which impresses them all, especially 13-year-old Nino, the imaginative boy whom he befriends.

Soon the truculent Michele is picking quarrels. One of the men with whom he quarrels is found dead a few days later, and everyone assumes that Michele has killed him, particularly since the fellow has been carrying on an affair with Michele's sister. Disdainfully, the veteran declares his innocence, but only his young friend Nino believes him; he is sentenced to 13 years in prison.

Grupa settles back into its traditional quiet poverty; the Germans are beaten back; the Americans come in. After the war Michele Rende returns a changed man: he has escaped from prison, fought with the partisans in the north, and picked up some of their radical ideas.

Michele tries hard to live in peace. Renting a sour patch of land from Nino's father, he and the boy cultivate it furiously. But he can no longer live only for himself; he begins urging the peasants to seize the uncultivated land neglected by the absentee owners.

Bloodied Hands. After that, The Brigand moves to a relentless climax. Michele incites acts of violence against landowners, sets fire to their homes, and leads a pathetic peasant march to divide the big estates. He is driven to the hills as an outlaw, finally cornered and killed. Nino looks on helplessly, convinced that his friend is a victim of injustice, but realizing, too, that he was not the man to lead the peasants: "You could not carry justice to mankind with hands that were befouled with so much blood."

Author Berto could easily have spoiled his book by sentimentalizing Michele into a hero of the oppressed, or by treating him merely as a vicious criminal. Instead, he has looked at him steadily with profound sympathy but also with implicit disapproval. The Brigand, as a social document, may help explain why many Italians have snapped at the Communist bait. As a novel, it is an honest and affecting picture of human beings in travail.

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