The case of Grazia Deledda was a singular one: the only Italian Nobel laureate honored as a prose writer (Montale and Quasimodo were poets; Pirandello and Dario Fo essentially dramatists), Deledda’s oeuvre unsettled our literary establishment, which puzzled for a long time over the reasons behind the prize.
As had already happened with Matilde Serao, critics sought to pigeonhole Deledda within literary schools, denying her autonomy and originality: a failed verista, the very accusation leveled at Serao? A corollary of Verga and D’Annunzio? Of Federico Tozzi, to whom she was bound by deep friendship? Lyric–visionary and symbolist? It would have sufficed to read her without prejudice to discover how unique Deledda is in Italian literature: an ancestral author, she speaks of sorrow as destiny, of life as a journey toward an elusive haven of stillness (death?), of a living, magical, and indecipherable nature, indifferent to the suffering of mankind.

The red twilight glow, overcome near the altar by the gleam of tapers, covered the crowd as if with a veil of blood, but little by little the veil turned black, faintly illuminated by the gold of the candles.
The crowd could not bring itself to leave.
(...) It was like the distant murmur of the sea, the stirring of the forest at vespers; it was an entire ancient people moving on, moving on, chanting the naive prayers of the early Christians, moving on, moving on along a dark road, intoxicated with sorrow and hope, toward a place of light, yet distant, unreachable

.
If we limit ourselves to the plot, one cannot but share the judgment of Benedetto Croce, for whom Deledda’s novels were

all equally plausible, and none fashioned in such a way as to leave a deep impression on the hearts and imaginations of readers

.
To grasp the emotional and spiritual power of Canne al vento, one must let go, surrendering to her prose, beyond the storyline.
The novel’s protagonist is Efix, the old servant of three women, once well-off landowners and now reduced to living off the yield of a “smallholding,” tended by the man.
The narrative opens precisely in this corner of the world.

The moon rose before him, and the voices of the evening warned the man that his day was done.
It was the rhythmic call of the cuckoo, of early crickets, an occasional bird's cry; it was the sigh of the reeds and the ever-clearer voice of the river: but above all it was a breath, a mysterious panting that seemed to rise from the earth itself; yes, the working man’s day was over, but the fantastical life of elves, fairies, and wandering spirits was beginning.
(...) Efix heard the sound the panas (women who died in childbirth) made washing their clothes down at the river, (...) and believed he caught a glimpse of the ammattadore, an elf with seven caps inside which he keeps a treasure, leaping here and there under the almond grove, pursued by vampires with steel tails.

Nature, inhabited by malignant spirits, mirrors and feeds the terrible secret Efix harbors within: he killed his mistresses' father, an authoritarian and violent man; he did so to allow the other daughter to flee, to find freedom on the mainland.
It is also for this reason that Efix has dedicated his life to the three women, to whom he is bound by a deep tie, as servant, friend, and protector.
He wishes for them to be well; he fears dying before seeing them safe, delivered from poverty, with another man to protect them.
When Giacinto arrives—the son of the sister who fled to the mainland—Efix hopes he might be the right person, capable of restoring prosperity and peace to his mistresses.
He is mistaken: Giacinto is a petty rogue, who flirts with a local girl and flatters Noemi, the youngest and proudest of the women.
What is more, Giacinto loses substantial sums gambling, pledging as collateral the “smallholding,” their sole source of income.
Efix was unable to defend them, to protect them; thus, he flees, leaves the village behind, and embarks on a prolonged wandering across the Nuoro region, keeping company with beggars and asking for alms at the numerous village festivals.
It is a journey that leads nowhere.

A nightingale sang on the solitary tree still suffused with smoke.
All the cool of the evening, all the harmony of the serene distances, and the smile of the stars to the flowers and the smile of the flowers to the stars, and the proud joy of the handsome young shepherds and the pent-up passion of the women in red corsets, and all the melancholy of the poor who live waiting for the scraps from the rich man’s table, and the distant sorrows and the hopes beyond, and the past, the lost homeland, love, crime, remorse, (...) the laughter and weeping of the world, trembled and vibrated in the notes of the nightingale atop the solitary tree that seemed taller than the mountains, its crown grazing the sky and the tip of its last leaf driven into a star.
And Efix began to weep. He did not know why, but he wept.
He felt as though he were alone in the world, with only the nightingale for a companion. (...) All the elves and monsters had stirred and were dancing in the shadows, pursuing and surrounding him

Efix will return home and die in peace, because Noemi has agreed to marry a cousin of hers, a wealthy landowner.
The happy-ending narrative, steeped in religiosity, drains the novel of its tension: it is an awkward and affected attempt to give meaning to Efix’s life, to offer us hope.
Yet that is not how it is.
Like the grieving parents in David Grossman’s Falling Out of Time, we all walk in a sacred procession toward that mysterious place that is the hereafter.
Yet our march grinds to a halt before a wall.
All is silence.
"A yellow point shone behind a castle (...).
Slowly its light illuminated the entire mysterious landscape, and as if at the touch of a magic finger everything vanished; an azure lake flooded the horizon (...) In the silence, the stream beat like the blood of the sleeping valley.
And Efix felt death drawing near, slowly, as if climbing silently up the path, accompanied by a cortege of wandering spirits, by the beating of clothes by the panas down at the river, by the gentle fluttering of innocent souls transformed into leaves, into flowers....

Why read it? No one in our literature has sung of living nature with such depth.

Reeds in the Wind