"Lost between Europe and Africa, and belonging to nowhere" - Some Novels from Sardinia

Capo Caccia, Sardinia

A few months ago, all I’d read of Sardinian literature was 1926 Nobel Prize winner Grazia Deledda’s Reeds in the Wind (Canne al vento, 1913), which came to my attention thanks to a mention in a short story by Antonio Tabucchi. I’d relished Deledda’s novel despite finding the conceit behind its title – that people “are like reeds in the wind…we are the reeds and fate is the wind” – a bit trite. But then the wind in Sardinia was something I’d never experienced. Visiting the island for the first time this October, I caught the tail-end of a three-day Mistral. My respect for Deledda and for the Sardinians who must contend with such elemental forces deepened considerably. 

My appreciation for Sardinian literature also deepened considerably, thanks to sampling a handful of other Sardinian works. This small effort, further limited by the paucity of titles available in translation, seemed almost mocked by the sagging shelves of the Sardinian literature section of the Mondadori store in Alghero. But just considering the few works I’ll discuss here, I might dare some generalizations. Each work engages a life shaped by forces no less powerful or fateful than Deledda’s winds and also possesses, as one might expect, a strong regional emphasis, delving deeply into Sardinian culture, history, tradition and landscape, as well as the lasting impact of 19^thcentury land reforms. Each of these authors mixes Sard with Italian, with translators choosing (or requested by authors) to retain some Sard words even in translation. Another commonality: each of these works casts a retrospective glance, as though the past, with its deep traditions, occasional barbarities and commonplace cruelties continuing well into the 20th century, has an especially strong hold on the present. And finally, all of the authors here spent extended periods on the continent or, among those still living, make their homes there today, underscoring the peculiar tension between the island, the most isolated major island in the Mediterranean - closer to Africa than to the Italian mainland - and the rest of Italy. 

Most Sardinian literary activity appears centered in Nuoro, largest town of the rugged and rocky interior known as the Barbagia, and in the surrounding villages with which Nuoro carries on a vigorous intercourse. In fact, of the five Sardinian authors I’ve now read – Deledda, Salvatore Satta, Marcello Fois, Michela Murgia and Milena Agus - all but Agus, from Cagliari, hail from this cultural capital. Dominated by one of the island’s highest peaks, Mount Ortobène, Nuoro is something of a geographical peculiarity, sloping from the summit of a high hill down to a valley below, with social implications all along the differential. Despite the city’s commanding setting, cheap modern apartment blocks hem in the historic center, making for a less than spectacular first impression. But the town, known as “the Athens of Sardinia” in Deledda’s time, still wears its literary past on its sleeve. Many of its numerous piazzi pay homage to literary figures, as do plaques on walls marking homes and haunts. Deledda’s house is now a museum. Even today an undeniable poetry hangs about the place, often explicitly scrawled on walls. Books hang from the ceiling in the town’s most famous literati gathering spot, the Café Tettamanzi. A reputable annual literary fair occurs in a neighboring village. Of the more contemporary writers I read, most are tied to or on the periphery of the “Sardinian Literary Spring” that began in this city in the 1980’s and still continues as one of Italy’s most notable contemporary literary schools. 

 Ceiling decor in the Café Tettamanzi, Nuoro, Sardinia

On to the books themselves:

Milena Agus, From the Land of the Moon 

Ann Goldstein, translator, Europa Editions
The original Italian title of Agus’ 2006 novella, Mal di pietre, might be translated as “Stone Pains” or “The Aching Stones” or “Sick of Stones.” My own failed effort to find a non-jarring English equivalent seems to have been shared by translator Ann Goldstein, who avoided a literal translation altogether. The original title references Sardinia’s most evident geological feature - the rocky, barren, moonlike roughness of the place - as well as the kidney stones that plague Agus’ main character, the narrator’s paternal grandmother. Deeply troubled as a girl, the grandmother’s arranged mariàge blanc is little more than the family’s effort to wipe their hands of her. Sent to a spa outside Rome after WWII for treatment of her kidney problem, she meets a man referred to only as “The Veteran,” and their meetings blossom into a passionate and temporary affair resulting, nine months after her return to Cagliari, in a son. A hyper-romanticized 2016 film adaptation capitalizes on the more schmaltzy aspects of this story: and, bizarrely, rips the action completely out of its critical Sardinian context by transporting it to France. Agus’ novel actually proves to be a fairly grim view of the position of Sardinian women. Contradicting an intentionally ironic comment in another of these novels that “Women don’t exist in Sardinia,” Agus may amply demonstrate that Sardinian women not only exist, but possess extraordinary qualities; however, these often lie buried beneath circumscribed roles that, at least up until the recent past, could easily consist of an unending succession of oppressive, destructive trials. Her main character is pulled out of school at an early age for fear of the unhealthy influence of literacy, passes through an adolescence of self-mutilation and neglect, and enters a madness that, in the novel’s twist ending, lays waste to the romantic elements that have pulled the reader along, leaving exposed the rocky contours of a culture that could facilitate such oppression. 

Michela Murgia, Accabadora

Silvester Mazzarella, translator, MacLehose Press

A more in depth look at the lives of women in Sardinia is provided by Murgia’s 2009 novel, which delves into some particularities of roles women play in Sardinian culture. I particularly liked Murgia’s honing in on these almost ethnographic Sardinian details, which she uses to unlock a wealth of observations about social life and practices on the island. She begins on the first page by revealing that the narrator, an impoverished 8-year-old girl when the novel opens, has been “conceived twice, from the poverty of one woman and the sterility of another,” a “fill’e anime” or soul-child essentially sold by her family to a relatively wealthy spinster in order to serve as help-maid. This was apparently not an uncommon practice in rural Sardinia up into the last century, and the book’s dedication - “To my mothers, both of them” - suggests Murgia may have a more than passing familiarity. The book’s title, key to the plot, is omitted from the glossary of Sard words Murgia includes at the beginning of the book, but refers to another covert and remarkable social role practiced by the girl’s guardian, and which serves as the driver for the plot unfolding around the child’s growth into adulthood and discovery of her guardian’s secret life, with attendant consequences. I found this a terrific short novel, particularly for the light it shines on traditional aspects of life in the Barbagia and for the way Murgia uncovers the tension between tradition and modernity in this deeply entrenched culture. 

Supramonte mountains, near Oliena, Sardinia

Marcello Fois, The Advocate

Patrick Creagh, translator, The Harvill Press
Marcello Fois is probably Sardinia’s pre-eminent living writer. In his novella The Advocate (Sempre caro, 1998), Fois deftly employs a concentrated style that nonetheless manages to convey the Sardinia that, in an epilogue, Fois calls both “my joy and my torment.” At 117 pages in Patrick Creagh’s English translation, Fois’ tale of a stubborn lawyer pursuing justice for a young man fleeing an alleged livestock theft and then consequently suspected of a murder possesses the suspense and tension of a fine mystery (one strongly reminiscent of Sicilian writer Gaettano Savaterri’s La Congiura dei Loquaci, another tale of a young man accused of a crime and forced into hiding). But Fois uses this vehicle, and its giallo qualities, to evoke the whole world of late 19^thcentury life in the Barbagia, using carefully placed details to replace the laundry lists one finds in fat realist novels and creating space for the reader’s imagination to fill in the rest. A trio of different narrators helps to expand the novel’s perspectives.  

Marcello Fois, Bloodlines

Silvester Mazzarella, translator, MacLehose Press

Fois’ The Advocate had me wanting to read more of this exceptional Sardinian author, so in Nuoro, in a bookshop across from the city’s infamous Café Tettamanzi, I purchased an English translation of Bloodlines (Stirpe, 2009). This proved a considerably more ambitious work than The Advocate, with a more daring narrative style and a far grander sweep, an epic account of the Chironi family of the small village of Lollove on the slopes of Mount Ortobène just outside Nuoro. Stretching over a period of some 50 years – and with backwards glances to the family’s origins via a Spanish envoy, Don Gaspar de Quiéron in the 17^thcentury – the novel describes the family’s passage through a kind of hell arranged, in fact, in a three-part structure referencing Dante, only Fois’ work starts with Paradiso and ends with Purgatorio, with Inferno occupying the lengthy middle. 

The novel opens with young Michele Angelo Chironi, the novel’s protagonist, falling in love with Mercede Lai during a church service. Marriage follows, then a large number of children, a good half of whom die before or shortly after birth. These seem to be the luckier ones, since great trials await the poor family, and if Fois’ novel were a straight linear narrative, tragedy would pile upon tragedy in an unbearable manner. But Fois is interested largely in how people cope with trauma and history, and the narrative form, within its structure of a rearranged Divine Comedy, further breaks up linearity and instead seems to turn in spirals, perhaps an echo of Dante’s multiple circles. Fois’ omniscient narrator breaks in frequently to cut off a story or defer it until later. An incident is indicated, then fully revealed only further on in the work, as stories build upon one another, get truncated by other events, come back around like eruptions of memory, the full tale dependent upon the proper time for its telling. In the background, the first half of the 20^thcentury - with the intrusions of two world wars and of Fascism – unspools around a scouring portrait of Sardinian village life. Unlike the treatment of adversity in Agus’ novel, kept under a romantic veneer for much of her book, Fois offers little in the way of consolation aside from the beauty of his writing and the courage of his good people. Bloodlines is the first of a trilogy exploring the Chironi family up to the present day; all three volumes are now available in English translation.

Nuoro, night

Salvatore Satta, The Day of Judgment

Patrick Creagh, translator, Apollo
As a motto, “My glass may be small, but I drink from my glass,” might fit Salvatore Satta’s The Day of Judgment (Il Giorno del giudizio, 1979), a deep quaff taken of the author's native Nuoro. The glass through which he viewed his city (darkly) almost certainly rested on his regular table in the Café Tettamanzi, just a few steps from the author’s home. But this is no small novel, as suggested by the scores of international editions of it on display today in the café and which point to the eminent place Satta’s novel occupies in Sardinian literature and beyond. The debt to the work owed by his successors is strikingly obvious in all the contemporary Sardinian literature I read, Fois in particular, as he engages with The Day of Judgment to the point of referencing specific scenes and lines, in Bloodlines even modeling Satta’s novel in using the family patriarch’s life as a temporal measuring tape. 

Curiously, however, despite the many translated editions of the book and high praise from influential critics in Italy and abroad, Satta’s novel seems to have flown largely under the radar; the otherwise excellent Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel (2003), for example, omits mention of the work and of the writer entirely, rather odd given his prominent role in Italy. “Writing is not my trade,” confesses the modest, unnamed narrator of this largely autobiographical work, and indeed Satta spent his public life as a renowned jurist and legal theorist, responsible for expunging the Fascists’ emendations from the Italian legal code following World War II. His juridical works remain standard legal references in Italy today. The manuscript of The Day of Judgment, Satta’s only novel, was discovered unfinished only at the author death. He had worked on it in secret for some 30 years. 

And what a manuscript. Though the book’s title may suggest something in the mystery genre, the biblical connotation is operative here, or rather what that might mean in Nuoro’s fundamentally “pagan” environment where religion seems merely incidental to ways of life in some ways unchanged for millennia. Recounting the life of town notary Don Sebastiano Sanna (obviously modeled on Satta himself), the narrator’s stoic, panoramic portrait of his Nuuro is an attempt, in his narrator’s words, to summon together, like a “ridiculous god,” its people “for the day of judgment, to free them forever from their memory.” The narrator’s attitude towards his hometown edges on resentment (“Nuoro was nothing but a perch for the crows”), his project no less a critical, careful reckoning than the one a judge like himself might levy on trying a case – or on weighing his own life. In notes appended to the end of the unfinished manuscript, Satta wrote that he created his characters perhaps not to free them from their lives, “but to rid me of mine.” 

Such a treatment seems at times almost pitiless; this a book draped in black crêpe and written in ashes and dust - “a cemetery of living beings.” More than fifteen references to death appear even before one reaches the end of the third page. Comparisons might be made to other works in which an author measures his fellow townspeople’s lives against the inevitability of death, such as Dylan Thomas’ Under Milkwood or Máirtin Ó Cadhain’s The Dirty Dust. At times the narrator’s take on his fellow citizens is withering - “Anyway, they had all grown old, in Nuoro, and no one remembered anything anymore, partly because there was nothing to remember” – but his inescapable need to come to grips with the circumstances of his origins betrays a grudging affection, even a loving one, the appreciation of an intellectual rendered alienated and apart from the community that nonetheless produced him (the social impact of reading and intellect in such a community as depicted in a chapter focused on the arrival of books into the Sanna household is particularly memorable). Satta’s refined, penetrating intelligence and bone-dry ironic tone also give the novel a subtly comic cast that betrays his narrator’s repeatedly grim pronouncements. The ambit of the author’s gaze radiates out from family to town to region to island to encompass the whole of life and death, alighting here and there to ponder some corner of Sardinian life, some practice, some recalled person, some great troubling question, all in the process of receding into the past and vanishing from memory. In the notes appended to the novel’s last page, Satta appears to view judgment not as punition, but as a creative imperative: the need for “someone to gather us up, to revive us, to speak about us both to ourselves and to others, as in a last judgment.”

Like Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard (Il Gattopardo), The Day of Judgment depicts a disappearing way of life – di Lampedusa on Sicily, Satta on Sardinia - and if I were stuck on an island and could choose only one of these books, my decision would almost certainly come down to which island I happened to find myself on. I hardly expected to find a novel of such monumental stature in Sardinian literature, but this is certainly among the finest of the many Italian novels I’ve read. Maybe just throw out the qualifier “Italian” – The Day of Judgment gave me the same excited sense of stumbling upon a little known classic that I experienced in finding Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy. 

From the Castello dei Doria, Castelsardo, Sardinia

Before I leave off this brief commentary on Sardinian literature, I feel a mention of Antonio Gramsci is warranted. Though his former home in Ghizeria, a small town in the middle of the island, was closed for renovation, a small and friendly visitor center provided information about this extraordinary 20^thcentury figure, whose notebooks and letters are nearly as valuable as literature as they are for 20^thcentury political philosophy. It felt remarkably fitting that the last book I read in Sardinia, a newly-issued unfinished work by Antonio Tabucchi entitled Et enfin septembre vint (E finalmente arrive il settembre) unexpectedly turned directly towards Gramsci and to the disappearance of local languages like Sard. I felt as though I’d come, via a path strewn with extraordinary treasures, full circle. 

Canaviais no vento

“All books are stupid, there’s never much truth in them, still I’ve read a lot over the last thirty years, I haven’t had much else to do, Italian books too, all in translation of course. The one I liked most was called Canaviais no vento, by someone called Deledda, do you know it?”

- Antonio Tabucchi, The Woman of Porto Pim (1982)

As a matter of fact, I did not know Canaviais no vento (1913) nor its author, Grazia Deledda (1871-1936), but a mention of any work of literature in a book by Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi almost inevitably sends me off to track it down – and bait like the above was completely irresistible. One seldom knows, however, when one writer mentions another writer so obliquely, whether or not a compliment is intended. In Tabucchi’s enchanting story the title is given in Portuguese (the original Italian title of Deledda’s novel is Canne al vento, rendered as Reeds in the Wind in the English translation by Martha King), as the speaker of the passage is a singer in a bar in the Azorean port city of Porto Pim who tells the visiting Italian writer an intimate tale of his youth, one with some relevance, it turns out, to the Deledda novel he so admires. Nonetheless, I took Tabucchi’s bait, and much to my surprise chomped down on a surprisingly lyrical, moving and unusual novel - authored by a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1926) no less.

With a title as naturalistic as Reeds in the Wind - and indeed, the title refers to the main character’s assertion that people “are like reeds in the wind…We are the reeds and fate is the wind” - one might have reason to expect a banal slog through romanticized, deterministic peasant life, but from the first pages Deledda’s novel proves a humanistic and intensely lyrical work of intimate, strong emotions; intricate moral struggle; the complexities of caste, power and poverty; and the quest for meaning and redemption.

Set in a small village just inland from the east coast of Italy’s island paradise of Sardinia, Reeds in the Wind is largely a novel of the poor and the aged. The main character, Efix, is an elderly servant on what remains of what was once a large farm belonging to Don Zame and his four daughters, the Pintor sisters. We learn early on that one of the daughters, Lia, escaped the island many years before, leaving behind her three sisters and an enraged and shamed father who, during his search for his escaped daughter, had been found dead one morning, perhaps of a stroke, though a small mark on his neck suggests that something else – a malevolent island spirit, or perhaps a more human intervention – might have been to blame. Lia’s disappearance, however, has not been altogether complete; shortly after her decampment, a letter from mainland to her sisters had assured them she was well, and, as the novel opens 20 years after her departure, the sisters have received another letter announcing the imminent arrival in the village of their nephew, Lia’s now grown son, Giacinto. In a small and superstitious community like this, the mere receipt of the letter is enough to cause concatenating ripples. And as the novel unfolds, Giacinto’s visit – and his struggle between duty and dissipation - is recounted through the impact it has throughout the village and the devastating consequences it holds for the sisters and for Efix.

Deledda captures beautifully the overlapping of emotions built up over decades between people who live in tangential relations and who have a long history of buried feelings towards one another bespoken by only the most laconic of communications. As well, she captures the weight of such uncommunicated emotions and of the poverty that presses upon Efix and the Pintor sisters, who have seen their holdings decline steadily until they themselves are threatened with direst poverty. As though to mock their fall, the ruins of an ancient baron’s castle dominate the valley in which they live. Deledda’s characters are replete with human frailties and weaknesses, spiritually and psychologically deformed by the poverty, superstition, and guarded, buried emotions that mark their lives, bent like reeds before the wind by the vicissitudes of events that they see as beyond their control.

With its acute attention to the landscape and to the cultural practices of the inhabitants of the region, Reeds in the Wind might easily have slipped into a sort of anthropology of Deledda’s native Sardinia, and there are certainly strong ethnographic elements in the novel, especially in the various festivals and saint days that provide glimmers of joy in the villagers’ otherwise mean existence. Particularly fascinating are the various superstitions and spirits believed in by the inhabitants, who have managed to keep such beliefs alive despite a strongly superimposed Catholic faith (I was reminded immediately of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s observation of polytheism’s generous ability to welcome and absorb new religious traditions). But Deledda’s intentions are not so shallow as to simply give us a portrayal of village life in Sardinia. Her plot unfolds with constant surprises and unexpected turns of event, and levels its focus at the shifting attempts of Efix to establish meaning and free himself from guilt in a pitiable life circumscribed by poverty, loneliness, and neglect. Perennially well-intentioned, Efix’s most charitable efforts often lead to unintended calamities; on top of this his fundamental goodness holds a dark secret. Attempting to balance what little he has in life with a sense of his own inner worth (continually undermined by the sisters, who see him as a mere servant despite his being closer to them than anyone else in the village), his benign attempts to be heard, to be recognized as good in others’ eyes, lead him drifting into an untethered, almost picaresque, searching life implicative of Christ’s wanderings in the desert (though considerably more handicapped by the infirmities and indignities of age). That Efix is a Christ figure is altogether obvious, even from the cross that ends his name, but Deledda is far too humanistic and subtle a writer to allow this memorable character to be in any way diminished by his employment in symbolic service.

If human communication is constrained and sublimated in Reeds in the Wind, it seems to find its outlet in the rich manner by which the natural world is invested with imagination and life. What’s perhaps most evocative in Deledda’s novel is her obvious infatuation with Sardinia’s landscapes; everything is alive in this novel (an occasional, subtle shifting of tense from past to present helps enhance this vitality). The crepuscular light casts into sharp relief a world that is magical and mysterious, and not a little frightening. Each plant or flower seems imbued with spirit. Each shadow is alive. The night that sees the human world constrict and contract into safety behind doors also sees, in the world outside, a wild explosion of animation, beauty and mystery:

Efix remained motionless, waiting. The moon rose before him, and evening voices told him the day had ended: a cuckoo’s rhythmical cry, the early crickets’ chirping, a bird calling; the reeds sighing and the ever more distinct voice of the river; but most of all a breathing, a mysterious panting that seemed to come from the earth itself. Yes, man’s working day was done, but the fantastic life of elves, fairies, wandering spirits was beginning. Ghosts of the ancient Barons came down from the Castle ruins above Galte on Efix’s left and ran along the river hunting wild board and fox. Their guns gleamed in the short alder trees along the river bed, and the faint sound of barking dogs n the distance was a sign of their passing. Efix could hear the sound that the panas – women who had died in childbirth – made while washing their clothes down by the river, beating them with a dead man’s shin bone, and he believed he saw the ammattadore (the elf with seven caps where he hid his treasure) jumping about under the almond woods, followed by vampires with steel tails.

A more careful reader than I might, as an experiment, apply some basic astronomy to Deledda’s wanton literary use of the moon, which seems to leap full into the sky nearly every night to cast its eerie and encompassing glow over the countryside and sea.  I hope I don’t in any way diminish Deledda’s accomplishment by comparing this attention to the landscape to the early fabulations of quasi-anthropologist Carlos Castaneda, whose melding of fiction with fact in ethnographic treatment of practices of sorcery among the Yaqui Indians of Mexico’s Sonora desert contains, for all its obviously kitsch elements, a stirring and memorable evocation of landscape and light as almost living entities with hidden powers. The same sort of vital and mystical atmosphere pervades Deledda’s (mercifully) more sophisticated writing, and the world cannot but look different and more sentient to a reader emerging from her captivating descriptions.

In her introduction to the English translation of Reeds in the Wind, Sardinian ethnographer Dolores Turchi notes that Grazia Deledda wrote of her native Sardinia from a “veiled” nostalgic distance, and suggests that this distance provides a somewhat romanticized, fabulist vision of the island and its inhabitants. Turchi also notes the irony of Deledda’s retrospective affection for this community, which had always been “severe” in its judgment of her:

When barely launched on her writing career the harsh criticism of relatives and townspeople…had blocked her literary vocation for some time. Good girls did not write stories and novels to be published for all the world to read, whose characters could be cause for ridicule.

In order to write, Deledda left Sardinia at an early age for mainland Italy, ultimately settling in Rome, where she was to spend most of the rest of her life. It is difficult to absorb this history without seeing, in the escaped Lia, an image of the author herself in the story. Though taking place 20 years prior to the point at which the novel begins, Lia’s flight acts as the novel’s chief precipitating event, one that governs the subsequent actions of the novel’s characters.  Efix’s good-hearted, protective championing of her escape seems to make of Lia an unusual secondary main character, never present (at least not in the flesh – though she appears to Efix occasionally as a kind of trick of light and shadow) but constantly hovering above the novel like a kind of resonating overtone, an overarching presence. She appears to serve as a token of Deledda’s own courage in fleeing the island to carve out a life for herself as a writer, an unusually modernist autobiographical artifact inserted into the novel as an explicit, gentle and forgiving riposte to the community she lovingly depicts in the novel’s fatalistic and insular characters. Though the novel vividly communicates the psychological complexities of this community, it also expresses a distinctly self-reflexive awareness of the writer as observer, raconteur and servant to the articulation of the unarticulated. It’s easy to see how Tabucchi’s own raconteur might have come to value Deledda’s novel above all of the “stupid” books he’s read.