Maestro Don Gesualdo     by Giovanni Verga, Translated by D.H. Lawrence Original title: Maestro Don Gesualdo Original language: Italian Published by Dedalus Pub. Date: September 9, 2000 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 356 pages ISBN: 1873982526 Edition: Re-print List Price: $12.99, £8.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £8.26 Buy online from Amazon.com for $10.39 Published by Greenwood Pub. Date: August 1976 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover, 454 pages ISBN: 0837181984 List Price: $37.50, £34.50 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £34.50 Published by California UP Pub. Date: 1984 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback List Price: £8.95 Not available for ordering

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The last fruit of Verga’s artistic maturity and translated into English by D.H.Lawrence no less, this novel tells the story of a man who, from humble beginnings, through struggle and hard work and not without shrewdness and a certain lack of scruples, has accrued wealth, power and fertile land. The price he pays for his rise on the social scale is a hostility that surrounds him everywhere: misunderstood and unloved by his family, governed by cupidity, he lives a troubled and unhappy life, secretly longing for peace and affection. Consumed by evil, he suffers an inglorious decline not only of his physical strength but also of his hopes, which are dashed as, gravely ill, he witnesses the squandering of his fortune by the daughter he wished to have educated in the traditional manner of the nobility but who has married a bungling, greedy inadequate.

The parable of Mastro Don Gesualdo tells of another kind of defeat that here, unlike with ‘Ntoni Malavoglia in Verga’s The House by the Medlar Tree, befalls a man lacking in all idealism and moral judgement, who has sacrificed everything to possess material goods. In Don Gesualdo the author tries to focus on the corruption of a soul, the impossibility of a person born into poverty of bettering himself without losing too much — the impossibility of acquiring worldly goods without losing one’s way in the process.

‘It was precisely on the balcony of the alley, looking squinting on to the square, for the second-grade guests and the poor relations: Dame Clara Macrì, so humble and so shabby that she seemed like a servant; her daughter Mistress Agrippina, a house-nun , a girl with such a moustache, and a pimpled brown face like a begging friar, and two eyes black as sin which roved round among the men. In the first row Cousin Don Ferdinando, more inquisitive than a child, who had pushed himself forward with elbow-thrusts, and was stretching his neck out of his black cravat to look toward the Great Square, like a tortoise, with his grey, rolling eyes, his sooty, pointed chin, his long, quivering Trao nose, his queue curving in like the tail of a dog on his greasy collar that came up to his hairy ears; and his sister, Donna Bianca, poked away behind him, her shoulders rather bent, her breast thin and flat, her hair smooth, her face meagre and washed-out, dressed in flannelette in the midst of all her fine relatives.’ p37