Volume 31, Number 20 · December 20, 1984
The Godfather's Grandfather
By Robert M. Adams
The House by the Medlar Tree
by Giovanni Verga, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, with a new introduction by Giovanni Cecchetti
University of California Press, 258 pp., $6.95 (paper)
Mastro-Don Gesualdo
by Giovanni Verga, translated with an introduction by Giovanni Cecchetti
University of California Press, 329 pp., $7.95 (paper)
The She-Wolf and Other Stories
by Giovanni Verga, translated with an introduction by Giovanni Cecchetti
University of California Press, 299 pp., $6.95 (paper)
By the end of his short story titled simply 'Malaria,' Giovanni Verga has reduced his protagonist to the nadir of absolute misery. The innkeeper Carmine, known as 'Killwife,' because his four wives and all his five children have succumbed to malaria, has himself managed to survive, but barely. Broken in body and spirit, he drags listlessly about; his inn, buried deep in the fever-ridden fields of eastern Sicily, attracts no customers. After fifty-seven years in it, he is turned out, and continues to exist only by getting a job as a crossing-guard by the new railroad. There—in the old but still vital Lawrence translation—
Review, 3093 words
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