Reeds in the Wind by Grazia Deledda

Women in translation month! I usually intend to join in and then don’t manage it, but have managed a bit better this year – in that I’d finished one and I’m halfway through another. First up, Reeds in the Wind (1913), translated by Martha King from Italian – though I think perhaps Italian with Sardinian dialect thrown in there?

My friend Phoebe lent this to me a few years ago, and I’ve been meaning to pick it up ever since, so WIT month was a great excuse. I think she’s been to the area where it’s set, which I absolutely haven’t done. I wonder how much of rural Sardinia looks the same a century later? Deledda was quite a noted author, and certainly an extremely prolific one. Even a glance at her Wikipedia page is quite exhausting. But Reeds in the Wind is one of her most famous, apparently.

The protagonist is Efix – a man who has served the Pintor family for many years. He is a loyal servant, placing the dignity and happiness of the family above his own – and, indeed, above almost anything. And the family is no longer the dominant force in the area that they once were. Three unmarried sisters make up the current crop – Ester, Noemi, and Ruth. There was a fourth sister – but she disgraced the family by running away with a man and having a baby. And then dying.

It’s years later, and that man has grown up. News reaches the sisters (and Efix) that Giacinto intends to come and meet his aunts – and perhaps stay with them. He brings with him a youthful recklessness that threatens the life that the Pintor sisters have made for themselves. And Efix is determined not to let him do that.

I really enjoyed reading this novel. The supporting characters all rather blurred, and even the three sisters didn’t have the most distinct personalities, but the chaos caused by a cuckoo in the nest is handled so well. As life becomes upturned, we see family secrets coming to life, and the community around them being outraged and enjoying the outrage. There’s a section where Efix is forced to live away from the community that is perhaps less strong, and feels rather out of Deledda’s range of experience and observation – but anything in the small Sardinian landscape is captivating.

I’m not usually one for landscape descriptions, and I don’t remember any specifics, but Deledda certainly conveys the atmosphere of the environment really well. And you can feel how essential the land and its produce were to the self-sufficient community. There is a benevolent claustrophobia to it all, that can lose its benevolence as soon as something shifts in the ecosystem, or your standing slips in the social rankings. It’s vivid, and Martha King manages to keep that vividness in the translation – that has the added difficulty of being translated more than eighty years after the original was written. It never feels jarring in period or tone.

Equally interestingly laced through the narrative is the folklore and faith of the community – the superstitions that guided their understanding of the world, thrown lightly into sentences. There is no complex theology here, or even a faith that would be recognised by outsiders, but the sort of daily fears and hopes that have been passed down through generations, unimpeded by outside influences – and that would disappear in the next few decades. I think Deledda is better at communities than individuals, but perhaps that was more important in this novel. It’s a fascinating snapshot.