“And God promised a good year, or at least he made all the almond and peach trees in the valley cover themselves in flowers.”
We found a beautiful, dated version of this novel in a bookstore, and we decided it was there just for us, those of us who always love reading a story with a touch of something far removed from contemporary life.
From the first pages, we realized we were giving ourselves a great gift by having this story before us, expertly written and with a rustic feel. Without further ado, we can tell you that it’s a novel that feels like poetry; it feeds and thrives on those landscape images of fields, streams, and flowers that no one else can offer like poetry, or perhaps Grazia Deledda did.
The story is very simple and is entirely filtered through the eyes of old Efix, so old and shabby that one wonders where he finds the strength to carry out the daily tasks that require him—a verb we use appropriately—to care for the Pintor ladies’ small farm and to serve as guardian and protector of the women themselves following their father’s death.
Efix may be our protagonist, of course, but so are the three women, or his nephew Giacinto who bursts into their monotonous lives and disrupts them; just as he may be the old Pintor family home, which, like everything in this novel, is decaying and dying.
The novel must be placed within the right context and time period, not because it belongs only to that period, but because it is necessary and proper to fully appreciate its nuances. Let us remember that Grazia Deledda is the only Italian woman to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
We are in the midst of a decadent, verist, and magically ancestral novel that immerses us in the rural and simple reality of Sardinia from another time and welcomes us without ever making us feel alienated or out of place.
Deledda’s writing, though it has an ancient flavor even in its form, invites the reader to continue reading with ease and engagement, even though we are faced with characters who are not very entertaining and very harsh with themselves and others.
We finally attempted an experiment that was a success: we exposed the novel to young teenagers, who, astoundingly, appreciated it.
Grazia Deledda can and must still speak to us. All we have to do is reverse the trend that is unfortunately being followed: not forget her and continue to talk about her.
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Grazia Deledda, Canne al Vento, Mondadori, Milano, 2025 (prima edizione Fratelli Treves, Milano, 1913).