Grazia Deledda
Marianna Sirca

THE REVIEW

Love makes you suffer: the distance between two lovers, the memory of a perfect moment, the sensation of the sound of footsteps slowly approaching, the bitter tears shed on a festive day, the taste of lips barely touched, the warmth of four hands firmly joined together…

After reading “Canne al vento,” I absolutely needed more Grazia Deledda, a little-consumed Sardinian drug that offers great satisfaction. I went to the bookstore and asked for something by the Nobel prize winner. They suggested, almost clandestinely, “Marianna Sirca,” a short novel published in 1915 during her full "Sardinian" period.

A soap opera for women like I am literarily: a wealthy thirty-year-old heiress and spinster, the classic Sardinian bandit who goes into hiding, intrusive servants and relatives, a poignant love filled with waiting and tears, and belonging to different social classes that influences every action and reaction. A two-hundred-page novel laden with feelings that are faithfully mirrored in nature and atmospheric events.

Delicate and light prose tinged with dialect expressions, few words to paint a scene, few "coordinates" to detail a sensation. The “grace” of Deledda in realistically describing her Sardinia, the harsh and rugged hinterland of Nuoro in the early 20th century, is masterful. Female emancipation and the dichotomy of freedom-imprisonment leap out on every page, they are the stars to follow in attempting to navigate the seemingly calm sea of Deledda, where the waves crash violently and dramatically upon the rocks of pride and supposed cowardice.

Excellent book that I recommend first and foremost to all Sardinians, to those who devour literary love stories, to those who do not like to read a page five times to understand something. An author for lovers of 20th-century Italian literature, for readers simple on the outside but complicated on the inside.

Love is joy and makes you fly, sometimes it makes you suffer greatly, often it even makes you die. As Emily Dickinson rightly said, that it is all is the only thing we know about love.