Upon picking up this novel by Grazia Deledda, one's mind immediately turns to Canne al Vento (see the review on this site), hoping to rediscover the same magical atmosphere of the Sardinian author’s masterpiece. The environmental and social context is the same; here too, pain is treated as destiny, life as a journey toward death, yet that living, magical, and indecipherable nature—the hallmark of Canne al Vento—is missing. Instead, the Sardinian landscape serves as a counterpoint to a human drama irremediably doomed from the outset. This is how the author describes the tanca, the land set aside for pasture.

The lush pastures, as spring drew to a close, took on a luminous, golden green: thistles opened their golden and purple blossoms, brambles flaunted their wild roses. (...) In certain places, the watercourse flowed among groves of elder trees, where the sun barely penetrated, forming mysterious green pools surrounded and intersected by rocks, against which the water broke murmuring

. Petrarch’s verses seem to echo here, yet we are not in Provence; we are in harsh, savage, ancestral Sardinia. It may well be that the verdant, luminous tanca is not real, but rather a delirium of Elias Portolu, a way to bring solace to a restless soul. Unlike his brothers and his father, "short, sturdy, bearded, with bronzed faces and long black hair," Elias "was tall and slender, with an extremely pale, delicate, clean-shaven face." He has returned from the prisons of the Kingdom, and this experience has transformed him profoundly, physically and spiritually:

the long imprisonment had made his hands and face pallid, (...) his laugh was tired and fractured, his voice faint; (...) he looked like a woman dressed as a man. Furthermore, his language had taken on something peculiar, half Italian and half dialect, with curses that were entirely continental

. In prison he learned to read and write; he brought back church books with him, which he studies in secret. "Confused visions" sway through his sleep. In his dreams, it seemed to him that

strange sheep with human faces leaped over the wall that enclosed the tanca; and he pursued them, panting

. When a man comes toward him. It is Uncle Martinu, a sort of giant whom everyone calls the father of the forest. To him, still in his dream, Elias confesses that he is weak, that he can take no more. And with his mighty voice the giant tells him, "if you don't want trouble, go become a priest!" And it is to Uncle Martinu once again that Elias turns, no longer in a dream, when he realizes he has fallen in love with his future sister-in-law, the beautiful Maddalena; he rejects the old man's counsel to openly declare his love, fearing he might offend his brother, shatter a marriage arranged long ago by the families, terrified of scandal, lacking courage. But

unfailingly, Maddalena appeared to him in dreams. And they were dreams that troubled and painfully aroused him.

Above all, the scene of the dance with Maddalena returned incessantly in his dreams,

for his shoulders, his waist, his hand retained intact the physical impression of Maddalena’s body and hand: and his mind, recollecting her words, lost itself once again in a vertigo of pleasure and anguish

. His pusillanimity will be his undoing, and it will be up to Death to decide for him. Before the lifeless little body of the child had with Maddalena, he will feel "a tenuous veil of peace and almost joy descend," alone and free from all human passion.

If we look beyond the Sardinian context, the figure of Elias is emblematic of those unable to break out of society’s constraints, of unwritten rules of which he is, in fact, a prisoner. How difficult it is to voice one's feelings and be authentic! Reaching perhaps beyond Grazia Deledda’s own intentions, there appear to be three worlds in the novel: the simple world of the common folk who accept death and suffering with resignation, and who would be ready to acknowledge the love between Elias and Maddalena; the hypocritical and superstitious world of religion, which represses feelings while tolerating petty carnal sins provided they remain buried beneath a blanket of silence; and the figure of the wild sage, who does not believe in God and urges courageous choices. It is an interpretation that would make the novel compelling, were it not engulfed by a melodramatic and penitential tone.

Why not read it? Melodramatic and mawkish, a disappointment.