Ivy

<p>Annesa one of Grazia Deledda’s most enigmatic and dramatic characters battles with a guilt she suffers when her own strength tempts her to a crime that will save others who won’t save themselves. Annesa has tragically attached herself to the tree of the Decherchi family once noble but now dry-rotting on hard times. Her lover Paulu Decherchi compares her to a suffocating ivy clinging to the dead trunk.</p><p>Distraught almost to the point of madness Annesa finally cuts herself free from her adopted family. Escaping arrest for a wealthy relative’s death -- and fleeing the men who dictate the laws that control the lives of women and the poor -- she imposes her own punishment of exile. But she will return to the impoverished Decherchis to complete her penance after she has purified her soul and found her own peace.</p><p>Annesa’s fate and destiny are co-joined to the wild Sardinian landscape described in Ivy with a passion only hinted at in Deledda’s other works. Its brooding and wild mountains scarred with haunted caves create an atmosphere weighed down by poverty prejudice and ill omen. </p><p>Many consider <em>Ivy</em> to be Deledda’s best work surpassing even <em>Elias Portolu</em> and <em>Reeds in the Wind (Canne al vento).</em> Here she deeply probes the misguided but altruistic motivation of a woman totally dependent on others who lack her own moral fortitude. </p><p>Deledda won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1926 writing fiction set in Sardinia mining it deeply and evoking its people and their character. <em>Ivy</em> Deledda’s third novel was originally published in 1908 in Italian as <em>L’Edera</em> and has never been previously published in English.</p><p>First English translation. Introduction notes bibliography. 198 pages.</p>