Reeds in the Wind (Italian Fiction in Translation)
A novel that follows a fallen landed family in Sardinia to explore tradition, modernization, honor, fate, and women’s lives. It renders attachment to the land and the strain of human relationships in a poetic yet grounded style.
Work Information
Like reeds in the wind, people bend and still go on living.
Set around an old landowning family in Sardinia, the novel lets decline, guilt, faith, and forgiveness meet in a slow arc. Through people bound to land and kin, it portrays the fragility of human beings before fate.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Italica Press
- Published
- 2009-02-01
- Pages
- 212 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.97 x 1.6 x 21.59 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781599104164
- ISBN-10
- 1599104164
- Price
- 4382 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Women's Fiction/Contemporary Women
The rugged landscape of Baronia on Sardinia sets the scene for this novel of crime, guilt and retribution. This novel presents the story of the Pintor sisters - from a family of noble landowners now in decline - their nephew Giacinto, and their servant Efix, who is trying to make up for a mysterious sin committed many years before. Around, below, and inside them the raging Mediterranean storms, the jagged mountains, the murmuring forests, and the gushing springs form a Greek chorus of witness to the tragic drama of this unforgiving land. Deledda tells her story with her characteristic love of the natural landscape and fascination with the folk culture of the island, with details about the famous religious festivals held in mountain encampments and the lore of the "dark beings who populate the Sardinian night, the fairies who live in rocks and caves, and the sprites with seven red caps who bother sleep." Introduction by the Sardinian ethnographer, Dolores Turchi.
GRAZIA DELEDDA was born in 1871 in Nuoro, Sardinia. She had a limited formal education, but was an avid reader. She published her first story in 1886 when she was fifteen, in a newspaper in Nuoro. Her stories continued to be published in one of the many fashion magazines of the late nineteenth century, Ultima Moda. Although the dismay of her family and friends distressed her, it also strengthened her resolve to succeed. In 1899 she left Nuoro and went to Cagliari, where she met and married Palmiro Madesani. A year later they moved to Rome, where Deledda lived a quiet life with her husband and two sons until her death in 1936, at sixty-five. Deledda wrote thirty-three novels and many books of short stories, almost all of them set in Sardinia. Among her better-known novels are Elias Portolu, Canne al vento (published by Italica Press in 1998 as Reeds in the Wind), La madre, Annalena Bilsini, and Cosima (Italica Press, 1988), her posthumous autobiographical novel. Grazia Deledda became, in 1926, the first Italian woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Reviews
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Lovely to read in English
A sad story but apparently a classic. I read it with interest
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Helpful when reading the Italian version
I loved the Italian version, but wanted to be certain that I had gleaned all of the plotline and the symbolic references, so bought the English version. It was very helpful, and I am happy to say that I probably did not in actuality need it. The translation was very close to the original and helpful particularly for some very complex grammatical structures that I had a little difficulty with in the Italian versiion.
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Wonderful
A really beautiful (and very moving) novel which gives a real flavour of Sardinia.
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Interesting, a bit dated
Worth a read as a novel from the first female literature Nobel laureate, and for its specificity of setting (Sardinia in the early-20th century). The story is not as easy to digest for contemporary readers, reliant as it is on religious morality, not helped by a fairly flat translation. However there is a lot of startling imagery that is quite worth digging in to.
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Five Stars
Excellent