3 Review(s)

A new translation of the stories of Giovanni Verga, the greatest Italian short-story writer since Boccaccio. Born into a well-to-do Sicilian family, in the 1870s and 80s Verga was an active observer and habitué of Milanese salon society, but eventually he found in the everyday lives of Sicilian peasants the inspiration for his finest narratives. Love, adultery and honour are recurring themes in stories grounded in the opportunism and hardship of peasant life, set against the scorched landscapes of the slopes of Mount Etna and the Plain of Catania. Verga's rich naturalism and originality of style have posed formidable problems for the few translators who have dared attempt him. This Penguin Classics edition by Professor McWilliam of his short stories, including Nedda, the ground-breaking narrative of Italian verismo, contains the first major versions in English since those of D. H. Lawrence in the 1920s. Two of the stories, Jeli the Herdsman and Rosso Malpelo, were described by Lawrence as among the finest stories ever written. Of Verga's Sicilian stories in general Lawrence wrote: 'The landscape will be more or less familiar to anyone who has gone in the train down the east coast of Sicily … And anyone who has once known this land can never be quite free from the nostalgia for it, not can he fail to fall under the spell of Verga's wonderful creation of it, at some point or other.'