Marianna Sirca [review]

by Grazia Deledda

We are all like this in life after all, in jail, to atone for the crime of being alive.

I loved this novel, in all its aspects. I liked the setting enormously, Sardinia at the beginning of last century, a little wild, a little tame, with nature as a daily companion of everybody's life, servants, masters and bandits. I fell in love with Marianna, a strong, unexpected, fascinating character. And I was finally conquered by Grazia Deledda's writing, her ability to describe something, from the most trivial of gestures to the strongest emotion, with amazing clarity, effectiveness and poetry. The story goes almost in the background when everything else is so fascinating, but I must say that I liked that, too, and the ending, which at first I found strange, also moved me a bit!