Relief floods through the reader when Agnes does not denounce Paul in his own church. He has been saved, with grand emotions, like love, revenge and scandal buried in the past. Despite a feeling that he has not acted as he ought, the time for renunciation coming before and not after the consummation of love, he gains the reader’s sympathy. But the book has an unexpected twist in almost its last gasp. The mother who has willed him to be a priest and who has waited anxiously in the church during the Mass to see what Agnes will do, has died. She has redeemed her son by the ultimate sacrifice. Paul who has given up Agnes under the promptings of his mother, has been left with nothing. His mother has been taken from him, his love rejected and only his shaken vocation is left. As he puts it in his own interior monologue; a door has been shut on his life and a kind of living death awaits him. So we are left with an unsatisfactory solution from an individual’s point of view, even if it gives an acceptable one to society.

I am surprised that Grazia Deledda has not been rescued from the obscurity of being out of print in this country by one of the feminist presses. A perceptive and gifted woman writer, who has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, with an individual voice should not be neglected. How good a writer is Grazia Deledda? Underrated in Italy as she does not write in the grand manner and is a regional novelist and not the exponent of any mainstream literary movement, she is still firmly established as an author of outstanding talent, if not of the highest ability. I would put her among the very best Italian writers of the twentieth century, with only the verist novelist, Giovanni Verga, and his fellow Sicilian, Luigi Pirandello, superior to her in talent and achievement.

Her reputation is long overdue for revaluation and the reappearance of La Madre in English and the recent translation of Elias Portolu (available from Quartet Books) should lead to her getting the attention she is due from the English speaking world. There really are not that many writers of this talent around for Grazia Deledda to rest in the cobwebs of obscurity. She shares the neglect that Italian Literature receives abroad, which is doubly sad, as it is praise abroad that brings Italian authors due recognition at home.

Eric Lane 1987.

CHAPTER ONE

To-night again Paul was preparing to go out, it seemed.

From her room adjoining his the mother could hear him moving about furtively, perhaps waiting to go out until she should have extinguished her light and got into bed.

She put out her light, but she did not get into bed.

Seated close against the door, she clasped her hands tightly together, those work-worn hands of a servant, pressing the thumbs one upon the other to give herself courage; but every moment her uneasiness increased and overcame her obstinate hope that her son would sit down quietly, as he used to do, and begin to read, or else go to bed. For a few minutes, indeed, the young priest’s cautious steps were silent. She felt herself all alone. Outside, the noise of the wind mingled with the murmuring of the trees which grew on the ridge of high ground behind the little presbytery; not a high wind, but incessant, monotonous, that sounded as though it were enveloping the house in some creaking, invisible band, ever closer and closer, trying to uproot it from its foundations and drag it to the ground.