The novel is set in Sicily in the first half of the nineteenth century: an ancestral, arid land,

a sun-scorched expanse, hills upon hills, tumbling over one another, bare, parched, stony, scattered with rare and stunted olive trees, with dusty prickly pears

.
Ever since his youth, Mastro Don Gesualdo has toiled relentlessly to amass wealth and

defend his property against everyone, to pursue his own interest, with not a single person in the town who was not his enemy, or a dangerous and dreaded ally

.
Moreover, as a commoner outside the circle of local landowners, he must therefore

always conceal the fever of profit, the blow of bad news, the surge of joy; and always keep a closed face, a watchful eye, a grave mouth!

He has the opportunity to escape the marginalization to which his peasant origins condemn him: he can marry Bianca, a member of the ancient yet decadent aristocratic Trao lineage.
At a reception hosted by an exponent of the local nobility, Don Gesualdo (

freshly shaven, dressed in fine cloth, with a brand-new hat between hands eaten away by lime

) makes his entrance among the town's notables, only to realize that marriage will not allow him to lower his guard.
And it is precisely to take revenge for the icy, contemptuous reception of his marriage by his wife’s relatives that Mastro Don Gesualdo flouts all local traditions by taking on the lease of the communal lands entirely alone, and at an exorbitant rent.
The description of the auction is one of the finest passages in the novel, depicting the landowners as they attempt to repel Don Gesualdo’s assault, then seek to invalidate the auction, and finally try to broker a deal—exerting pressure on Bianca as well, and thus appealing to the very kinship ties they had previously repudiated.
Yet our protagonist presses onward along his path, steadfast in his position

with his foolish little smirk, the only one who did not lose his head in that bedlam

.
Don Gesualdo’s victory—first and foremost a social one—concludes the first part of the novel, undoubtedly the most accomplished, owing to the detachment with which Verga narrates, through brisk and rapid dialogue, the dynamics of money and relationships within the local petty aristocracy.
The characters seem like puppets trapped within their social roles: there is no psychological introspection; instead, the cold facts speak for themselves.
Subsequently, an ideological and stylistic shift takes place: the novel descends into a sugary sentimentalism, taking on the characteristics of a serialized feuilleton.
Bianca proves to be an obedient yet distant wife, who shows neither affection nor intimacy toward Don Gesualdo, thereby reaffirming the disparity of their social origins.
Their only daughter, Isabella—perhaps the product of an earlier liaison of Bianca's—grows up spoiled and contemptuous toward her father, whom she too regards as a coarse peasant, failing to grasp his sacrifices and toil.
Don Gesualdo, now aged and ill, sees the estate he accumulated with such hardship squandered by his daughter and son-in-law, and dies amidst indifference and solitude.
And yet, even on his deathbed, he commends to his daughter

his property, to protect it, to defend it....
He explained what his estates had cost him...
he reviewed them all lovingly....
he described them minutely, clod by clod, his voice trembling, his hands trembling, the blood still flushing his face, tears welling in his eyes

.
Only out of a pang of conscience does he implore his daughter to give something (“you will consider it a gratuity”) to the illegitimate children he had by a servant woman—the only person who ever truly loved him.

Numerous critics consider the novel to be the

demystification of the social climber....
implicitly aimed at striking at the core values of bourgeois society itself

(Romano Luperini 1968) and the chronicling

of the rifts induced in the fabric of an archaic economy and a peasant society by a capitalist-bourgeois economy and society, governed by a brutal, exclusive economic code, by the alienating logic of wealth and possession

(Vitilio Masiello 1972).
This interpretive approach is superficial and reductive when set against the complexity of Verga’s pessimism.
While it is true that the author has his character state that “everyone in the world pursues their own interest, and goes their own way,” it is equally true that the accumulation of property is perceived by Don Gesualdo as a calling—one about which he can only lament, but from which he cannot escape.
Likewise, the other characters are all trapped in a social destiny that forces them to live in existential—and at times physical—misery.
One need only consider the figure of Bianca herself—among several others in the novel—who is forced to marry a man she does not love and spends her entire life frail and ill.
And so, perhaps, the true interpretive key to the novel lies in the impact wrought upon the human personality by an immobile, static social structure that permits neither ascent nor escape.

One of the earliest commentators on the novel observed that Verga never reveals

his characters through the internal workings of their soul: he makes them act, he does not show them in the act of thinking

(Guido Mazzoni 1890).
This authorial approach lapses into superficiality and obscurity in the second half of the novel, where the narrative pace becomes relaxed, fluid, yet conventional.
In the first part, up to the magnificent auction scene for the lease of the communal lands, the predominance of dialogue over narration and the reliance on brief character sketches are remarkably original literary devices designed to distance the author and capture the protagonists, highlighting their total surrender to their social roles and effacing the inner stirrings of thought: they are not conscious subjects, but societal marionettes.

Why read it? It can at times make for demanding reading, but the novel’s first part is well worth the effort.