when the snow comes, they will take you away

When the Snow Comes, They Will Take You Away by Eric Newby (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971)

A wonderful antidote to The Occasional Man (see below), this memoir about the year an escaped English prisoner of war spends hiding out in the Apennines in northern Italy in 1943 is a beautiful and heartwarming book, and is a very moving testament to the innate nobility of the common man.

The dirt poor (literally) Italians who risk their lives shepherding and sheltering Newby act with unqualified and natural dignity and goodness, and Newby’s sensitivity and acute powers of observation and description do them justice.  He is an appealing character himself: modest, grateful, pragmatic, and good humored, and his book, although written a long time after the fact, is vivid and utterly engaging.  He is equally fine at describing people and places, and When The Snow Comes, They Will Take You Away contains a gallery’s worth of indelible portraits and images. 

There is evil lurking all around the edges of this book, and extreme hardship and deprivation on almost every page, and this makes the human goodness at its center all the more miraculous and moving.  A beautiful book.