Reseña del libro "Sardinian Tales"
Grazia Deledda (1871-1936) was one of the greatest Italian writers. Winner of the 1926 Nobel Prize in Literature, she is remembered as the second woman, after the Swedish Selma Lagerlöf, to receive the prize in this field, and the only Sardinian as well as Italian woman. The life, customs, and traditions of the Sardinian people are prominent in Deledda's writing. She often relies on detailed geographical descriptions and her characters often present a strong connection with their place of origins. Many of her characters are outcasts who silently struggle with isolation. Overall Deledda's work focuses on love, pain and death, upon which rest feelings of sin and fatality. Her novels tend to criticize social values and moral norms rather than the people who are victims of such circumstances. In her work the influence of the verism of Giovanni Verga and, sometimes, also that of the decadentism of Gabriele D'Annunzio is evident, although her writing style is not so ornate. Despite her groundbreaking role in Italian and world literature, Deledda has not been considered a feminist writer, possibly due to her tendency to depict women's pain and suffering as opposed to women's autonomy. Edizioni Aurora Boreale has undertaken the far-from-easy task of introducing its readers to the literary universe of Grazia Deledda, as a tribute to this great and extraordinary protagonist of our literature, choosing to start from a fundamental yet perhaps less celebrated work compared to her major novels: the 1894 collection Racconti Sardi, published in Sassari by the publisher Giuseppe Dessi. Sardinian Tales (Racconti Sardi) is not only a mosaic of stories, but a true statement of intent by a young writer (then twenty-three years old) who, despite being far from the cultural centers of the era, felt the urgent need to create “a completely Sardinian literature”. The stories that make up the work project us into a harsh and atavistic Sardinia, unvarnished yet vibrant with life, in which nature is not a simple backdrop, but a powerful and ineluctable protagonist, a mirror of the human soul. The author introduces us to a patriarchal and isolated society, governed by an ancient and sometimes cruel ethic, made of primordial passions such as love, hate, revenge, and an obsessive sense of sin and guilt. In these early narrative works, Deledda already establishes the cornerstones of her poetics: - The ineluctability of fate: like the famous “reeds in the wind”, her characters are fragile and move at the mercy of an adverse fate. Men and women fight against injustice and fatality, often emerging defeated or tormented. - The inner conflict: the writer digs into the souls of her protagonists, exploring the complex dichotomy between instincts and social conventions. There is no clear-cut distinction between saints and sinners; there are only tormented souls, divided between good and evil, between reason and madness. - The magical and gory element: Sardinian Tales is a collection steeped in an atmosphere suspended between Verist realism and an aura of legend. There is no shortage of bloody stories, accounts of hidden treasures, and mysterious afflictions, which recall the cultural humus of the most remote Sardinia, a land of còntos de ochile (fireside stories). Reading these stories, we realize how modern a writer Deledda actually was. While describing an archaic world, her psychological inquiry is profound and universal. The author makes no compromises, offering an elegant yet ruthless stratigraphy of the human soul. Sardinian Tales is, ultimately, the gateway to understanding the genius of Grazia Deledda: a woman who was able to elevate her homeland to the stage of an eternal human drama, making it resonate far beyond the boundaries of the island, ultimately earning the highest worldwide literary recognition.
