Word: verga
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MASTRO-DON GESUALDO, by Giovanni Verga (454 pp.; Grove Press; $3.50) is now reissued in the U.S. for the first time in 20 years. When D. H. Lawrence, who translated the book from the Italian, first discovered the works of Giovanni Verga, he wrote enthusiastically: "He is extraordinarily good-peasant-quite modern-Homeric . . ." Best known outside Italy for a minor work-his story Cavalleria Rusticana, on which the libretto for Mascagni's opera was based-Author Verga ranks second only to Manzoni among Italian novelists. Born in Sicily in 1840, he planned as his major work a kind...
...daughters. The dialogue may be racy in Italian, but in Lawrence's English it comes out as a series of blurted phrases overloaded with sarcasm and exclamation points. It all seems as noisy as an Italian kitchen when the pasta has boiled over on the baby. But Novelist Verga tells his story with a superb eye for the beauty and squalor of his Sicilian village-its busybody priest scurrying among the decaying mansions and their decaying inhabitants, its restive peasantry caught up in their inept revolutions...
...books by Giovanni Verga, an Italian writer who died in 1922, still contained lessons for any fiction writer. The House by the Medlar Tree and Little Novels of Sicily were powerful stories about Sicilian peasants whose harshly tragic existence could not destroy their stubborn dignity. Another famed Italian brought out his first novel in eleven years; A Handful of Blackberries proved that ex-Communist Ignazio Silone knows where the rot of Communism lies and still has enough of his old novelist's skill to expose...
Some good reading that could easily be lost in the whirl is Giovanni Verge's Little Novels of Sicily (Grove). Verga, who died in 1922, was one of Italy's great writers, and these strong, tender stories of life at its most universal levels are among his best. After Verga, Frenchman Gil Buhet's The Innocent Knights (Viking) may seem like Gallic fluff. Actually, it is a charming story about a gang of schoolboys who shut themselves up in a moated ruin until their unjust elders and schoolmasters are ready to treat them like human beings...
...Giovanni Verga, the Sicilian novelist and playwright, is surely the greatest writer of Italian fiction after Manzoni," said D. H. Lawrence. Between the two,'born half a century apart, runs the great divide of 19th century European literature, on the one side romanticism, on the other realism. If Manzoni is Italy's Hugo, Verga is its Flaubert, and its Zola too. Now the finest of Verga's novels, I Malavoglia, is introduced to U.S. readers as The House by the Medlar Tree. The Malavoglia are a family of boatmen. Verga's is the plain tale...