The Dance of the Necklace

<p><span style=color: rgba(39 81 135 1)>In </span><em style=color: rgba(39 81 135 1)>The Dance of the Necklace </em>Grazia Deledda moves away from the countryside of her native Sardinia to create a classically modern urban narrative. Writing in a more spare experimental style she uncovers the vain anguish of our strongest passions: love ambition and the instinct to appear more than what we are. </p><p><span style=color: rgba(39 81 135 1)>A pearl necklace</span> symbolizes the dance of jealousy greed and love both erotic and familial which unites and divides the three main characters: an aunt and her niece who share the same name and a young count seeking to regain his family's bartered string of pearls. </p><p><span style=color: rgba(39 81 135 1)>An innocent deception</span><strong> </strong>turns on itself to explore the nature of the double and the mask: two topoi of modernity. Like Virginia Woolf Doris Lessing and Annie Ernaux Deledda delves into what it means to be a woman alone and aging living in a world where she is increasingly unwanted and invisible despite her lingering desires. </p><p><span style=color: rgba(39 81 135 1)>According to the critic Margherita Heyer-Caput</span> the novel is one of Deledda's most conscious and disquieting expressions of modernity. It challenges the labels often applied to this writer and overturns established critical categories to question margin-center hierarchies applied to her work. <em>The Dance of the Necklace </em>is a remarkable and rare example of Deledda's modernism.</p><p><span style=color: rgba(39 81 135 1)>First English translation</span> of <em>La Danza della Collana</em> (1924). </p><p>Introduction notes bibliography.</p><p>124 pages.</p>