A Gripping First Novel from Sardinia
CANTARELLA, HELENE
A Gripping First Novel from Sardinia Perdu. By Paride Rombi. Harper. 224 pp. $2.75. Reviewed by Helene Cantarella Former chief, Foreign Language Review Section, OWl Motion Picture...
...There is no modern concession to maladjustment here, no miasmic introspection, no maudlin self-pity...
...Despite a hard inner core of disbelief, Perdu makes himself accept Efisio as his father...
...For driving intensity of narrative pace, and poetic grandeur achieved through sobriety of treatment and classical economy of means, no better choice could have been made than this haunting and moving work...
...There is only good and evil —and, in the event of transgression, punishment, vengeance and death...
...This first novel by Paride Rombi, a 32-year-old Sardinian magistrate, is a work of extraordinary skill and beauty...
...The pivotal forces of this society—honor and family name—are safeguarded by a simple, primitive but inexorable code...
...Born out of wedlock when Angiuledda was but 16, Perdu had grown up in the lonely house of his dour grandfather, dimly aware that his position was different from other children's and that his birth was somehow connected with something dishonorable and illicit...
...It is sparsely inhabited by a proud, strong and taciturn people whose life has remained as it was a thousand years ago, changeless in customs and concepts...
...Psychologically alien though this may at first seem to us, it becomes plausible and even reasonable as we follow Perdu on his ill-fated quest through the strange, wild beauty of his closed world...
...This is the setting against which the 8-year-old Perdu plays out his brief and tragic story...
...He pulls down about him the last frail pillars of his life and dies in a manner consonant with the fate that had pursued him with such relentless fury...
...The happy and drowsy flow of his new life ends abruptly in horror when Efisio, suspecting Angiuledda of adultery, murders her while Perdu lies asleep in the next room...
...He becomes obsessed by the need to discover the identity of his real father...
...During the trial, at which he is the key witness, Perdu's love for his mother turns into anguished doubt about her mysterious past and the cause of her death...
...It begins on the day that his mother, Angiuledda Vargiu, marries Efisio Manzella...
...When he finally does, the truth is beyond his powers of endurance...
...At once simple and complex, it is swept through by the powerful and cleansing wind of pure tragedy in the ancient Greek acceptance of that word...
...Reviewed by Helene Cantarella Former chief, Foreign Language Review Section, OWl Motion Picture Bureau Forgotten by God and man alike, the sun-drenched island of Sardinia lies in the Mediterranean, a compound of dramatic beauty and all-pervading misery...
...Stemming directly from the great school of Italian regional literature of which Grazia Deledda (Nobel Prize, 1926) was the major Sardinian exponent, Perdu was awarded the coveted literary prize instituted to honor her memory...
...Any infringement carries the certainty of swift and terrible atonement...
Vol. 37 • June 1954 • No. 24
