Giovanni Verga

D. H. Lawrence said that Sicily in the mid 1800s was "the poorest place in Europe. A Sicilian peasant might live through his whole life without ever possessing as much as a dollar." Giovanni Verga, one of the greatest writers Italy ever produced, grew up in the circumstances Lawrence describes. In Little Novels of Sicily, first published in 1883, he poignantly re-creates the beautiful simplicity of Sicilian village life. In this collection, Verga seasons the grim lives of fishermen and farmers with comic elements, and evokes the mystical pleasures of the landscape in which he was born and to which he returned late in life.

Giovanni Verga (1840-1922) is the most important of the Italian Realist School of novelists. This new edition of "The House by the Medlar Tree" ("I Malavoglia") makes the complete English version of his masterpiece available once more. The story of the Malavoglia, a family of poor Sicilian fisherman, is Verga's moving rendering of the theme of mankind's struggle for self-betterment, the dignity of the struggle in the face of poverty and hardship, and the tragedy that the struggle inevitably incurs. D. H. Lawrence described Vega's work as "Homeric." Rayond Rosenthal's translation of "I Malavoglia" is the only complete version of this novel in English and conveys Vega's lyrical realism and the flavor of Sicialian village life superbly. The book is introduced by Giovanni Ceccheti, whose own translations of "Verga", "Mastro-don Gesualdo" and "The She-Wolf and Other Stories", are also available from California.