Presented by the Dante Alighieri Society of BC, with the support of the Istituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto.
The next meeting of the Italian Book Club will take place on Tuesday, June 21 at 8:30PM EDT / 5:30PM EDT.
The group will discuss the novel Canne al vento (Reeds in the Wind) by Grazia Deledda.
Please note that the discussion will be in Italian. An intermediate to advanced level of Italian is recommended.
To register, please email info@dantesocietybc.ca.
The Italian Book Club meets ONLINE on ZOOM once a month.
Meet other bibliophiles, share ideas and deepen your understanding of Italian literature, history and culture.
The Italian Book Club is FREE and open to all those in Canada interested in friendly and thought-provoking discussions of Italian books: fiction, non-fiction, classics, prize-winners, etc.
If you are new to the Italian Book Club and wish to join the meetings, please email info@dantesocietybc.ca to register and receive the MEETING LINK.
Schedule and more info: www.dantesocietybc.ca/bookclub.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The rugged landscape of Baronia on Sardinia sets the scene for this novel of crime, guilt and retribution. This novel presents the story of the Pintor sisters — from a family of noble landowners now in decline — their nephew Giacinto, and their servant Efix, who is trying to make up for a mysterious sin committed many years before. Around, below, and inside them, the raging Mediterranean storms, the jagged mountains, the murmuring forests, and the gushing springs form a Greek chorus of witnesses to the tragic drama of this unforgiving land.
GRAZIA DELEDDA was born in 1871 in Nuoro, Sardinia. She had a limited formal education but was an avid reader. She published her first story in 1886 when she was fifteen, in a newspaper in Nuoro. Her stories continued to be published in one of the many fashion magazines of the late nineteenth century, Ultima Moda.
Although the dismay of her family and friends distressed her, it also strengthened her resolve to succeed. In 1899 she left Nuoro and went to Cagliari, where she met and married Palmiro Madesani. A year later they moved to Rome, where Deledda lived a quiet life with her husband and two sons until her death in 1936, at sixty-five.
Deledda wrote thirty-three novels and many books of short stories, almost all of them set in Sardinia. Among her better-known novels are Elias Portolu, Canne al vento (published by Italica Press in 1998 as Reeds in the Wind), La madre, Annalena Bilsini, and Cosima (Italica Press, 1988), her posthumous autobiographical novel. Grazia Deledda became, in 1926, the first Italian woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.