Ignazio Silone (1900–1978) was one of the founding members of the Italian Communist Party and a prolific novelist whose works were widely read and appreciated for their thoughtful ethical stance on communism. In 1998, he was revealed to have been a Fascist police informer (Biocca and Canali Reference Biocca and Canali2000; Leake Reference Leake2003). Much recent scholarship has reckoned with these findings, but there remains a small handful of stalwart scholars whose work cannot countenance such a vision of Silone. In both this and her previous work (Paynter Reference Paynter2000) Paynter makes only fleeting reference to these discoveries. Coherent with her earlier project, here the focus is squarely on what she claims are Silone’s human qualities as they are highlighted by his personal correspondence with Silone’s host in Switzerland, Marcel Fleischmann.

The volume opens with a preface in which she justifies the study of personal correspondence by citing a 1963 dinner at which William Sheldon Lewis recalled that Horace Walpole once declared, in 1761, that letters ‘let us more intimately into important events’. The preface is followed by a chronology of the years 1891 (the year of Fleischmann’s birth) to 2003 (the year of Darina Silone’s death). Consonant with the volume’s stated goal of providing ‘the occasion for pause and reflection’, entries run the gamut in terms of scope, as evinced by the entry for the year 1918, in which – apart from the Armistice – we learn that Silone ‘tries to cope with the loneliness that he experiences’. An introductory chapter follows, in which Paynter coins the expression ‘freedom sniper’ to describe Silone’s lifelong political activity. Biographical essays on Silone and his wife Darina, Fleischmann and his companion Elsa Schiess seek to round out the image of the correspondents, here, too, with careful attention to the establishment of their human qualities (‘[Silone] had overcome a deep spiritual crisis and felt reborn as he returned to be a guy [sic] from Pescina’; ‘Elsa was an equally sensitive soul’), as well as of Silone’s heterosexual bona fides. Next come 11 pages of photos, of which two represent Silone’s and Fleischmann’s respective tombs. An afterword concludes the volume.

The correspondence itself forms the centerpiece of the volume, and consists of 185 postcards and letters (138 pages in total) spanning the years 1934–1976. Paynter divides the letters into two chronological periods: 1934–1944 (in which Silone lived in Switzerland, having taken up residence at Fleishmann’s Kleine Pension in February of 1933), and 1945–1976 (Silone died in 1978). The letters of the first period are more substantive in content (both intellectual and personal) than the second; a letter dated 3 June 1935 stands out, for example, for Silone’s expression of concern that Fleischmann is taking risks by harbouring a ‘revolutionary writer’, as he describes himself. In his letter of 1 February 1937, Fleischmann reiterates ‘a genuine desire to spend one or two days with [Silone] alone somewhere’; he continues, ‘We should really look for a special place for our first meeting alone’. Though both of these letters merit attention (for very different reasons), Paynter remains silent, and here, as elsewhere, explanatory endnotes are generally limited in scope. The second phase of the correspondence is predominantly concerned with travel plans and, as the years wear on, exchanges of information about health, the trials of ageing, and the events of Fleischmann’s children’s lives.

The book would have benefited from a more robust intellectual rationale in place of its avowedly emotional one. Consider the lengthy excurses into texts many degrees of separation from the correspondence, such as the page, in Fleischmann’s biographical sketch, devoted to ‘indispensable works’ on the topic of art dealership; the two-and-a-half-page quotation of poetry written by poet David Maria Turoldo, ‘who received the Silone Prize in 1989 for his affinity with the writer’ for the reason that his lines ‘come to mind’; or the pages devoted to Darina’s ‘soulmate’, Keshav Malik, because ‘[o]ne can only imagine what these verses must have meant for Darina’. While perhaps intended to hint at the emotional and affective impact the Silones had on the lives of others, recourse to such highly peripheral material reinforces the suspicion that even Paynter herself was hard pressed to maintain the modest claim that the letters instruct us on the value of friendship, especially considering the number of items that consist of a handful of lines at most, and express nothing more than ‘best wishes’, meteorological observations, or illegible scrawls.

Significant, too, is Paynter’s lament that the letters don’t ‘yield as much historical information as one might have hoped’. The steady stream of references to money exchanged, visits planned, and requests to assist friends and colleagues would suggest that these letters, far from sending ‘positive messages to posterity’, send very concrete and practical messages about clandestine political organisation. It is as though, having depoliticised Silone, there was nothing left to say.