Elias Portolu

by Grazia Deledda, Martha King (Translator)

Overview

Winner of the 1926 Novel Prize for Literature

After serving time in mainland Italy for a minor theft, Elias Portolu returns home to Nuoro, in rural Sardinia. Lonely and vulnerable after his prison exile, he falls in love with his brother's fiancée. But he finds himself trapped by social and religious strictures, his passion and guilt winding into a spiral of anguish and paralyzing indecision. For guidance he turns first to the village priest, who advises him to resist temptation; then he turns to the pagan "father of the woods," who recognizes the weakness of human will and urges him to declare his love before it is too late.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810112506
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	05/24/1995
Series:	European Classics
Edition description:	1
Pages:	194
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

GRAZIA DELEDDA (1871-1936) was born in Nuoro, Sardinia, which forms the setting for most of her fiction. In 1900 she moved to Rome with her husband, where she was commissioned to codify the folklore on her native island. Her subsequent work is informed and inspired by this research and by a keen understanding of the conflicts produced by the convergence of Christianity, strict social mores, and pagan superstition in rural Sardinia.  In 1926 she became the second woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded in recognition of the enduring power of her work and its consistent impact on a global audience. Remarkably, her work is little known to English-speaking audiences. Northwestern University Press also publishes After the Divorce, another of her novels.  

MARTHA KING teaches Italian literature at Gonzaga University in Florence, Italy. She has also translated works by Pratolini, Maraini, Banti, Leopardi, and Arcangeli.

Editorial Reviews

"[Deledda] belongs to more than just her own day. She does more than reproduce the temporary psychological condition of her period. She has a background, and she deals with something more fundamental than sophisticated feeling . . . what she does do is create the passionate complex of a primitive populace." —D.H. Lawrence

From the Publisher