The criteria and decisions of the Nobel Prize in Literature are always quite unpredictable, but seen with the perspective that a century has given us, the Nobel awarded to Grazia Deledda in 1926 is still somewhat incomprehensible. Not because she was not literarily deserving, but because it seems that her condition as a Sardinian woman who wrote about the harsh and brutal reality of her native island was far removed from the committee of Swedish readers who had awarded George Bernard Shaw in 1925 and would award Henri Bergson in 1927. The prize only makes sense if we understand that Deledda was a peripheral writer who earned a place at the center of the Italian and European cultural landscape thanks to three merits and one concession: the merits of having talent, of doing a lot of work (she was the author of about thirty novels and four hundred short stories) and of achieving great international success, and the concession of renouncing her mother tongue, Sardinian, to write in the language, Tuscan-based Italian, that the reunification of Italy (1861) made official and imposed.The novel Cendra, originally published in 1903 and now presented in Catalan by Mercè Ubach in a translation that seems rigorous and with a prologue that contextualizes the work and the author, is a good entry point to Deledda's literary universe. A novel of passions and unshakeable community social codes, a story of primary characters and imposing landscapes, Cendra combines two literary traditions: that of popular storytelling and that of the nineteenth-century naturalist novel. We are closer, in any case, to the vivid anthropological drama of Giovanni Verga's verismo than to the analytical positivism, with its scientific gaze and socio-ideological background, ofÉmile Zola.Compensate for the brutality of a miserable world

In Cendra, Grazia Deledda demonstrates that she is an agile and vigorous storyteller and that she knows how to create a gallery of characters that border on the archetypal without falling into typological folklorization. She also demonstrates that she is a virtuoso of precise and exuberantly sensory descriptions. The paragraphs in which she describes the Sardinian landscapes bring to mind the untamed talent of a painter with a strong, imaginative, wild, and symbolic stroke. Deledda's verism, in this sense, has a poetic breath that compensates for the brutality of an often miserable world populated by characters who fight, insult each other, drink, curse, and commit suicide.The dramatic core of the plot is a classic of 19th-century literature, and it attempts to answer the following question: how can a child of guilt, a bastard son of an already married father and a mother who abandons him as a child, make himself worthy of a respectable life? The protagonist's adventure, Annania, who through the blows of fortune and thanks to a benefactor goes from rural Sardinia to the city of Cagliari and, afterwards, to the continent and Rome, resonates with Balzacian and Stendhalian echoes. Deledda, however, ensures that he never fully sheds either Sardinian reality or his Sardinian condition: the weight of inherited guilt, the sense of honor and dishonor, primal passions, the present as a projection of old atavisms, life as fate... Reading Deledda reminds us that true literature can spring from European capitals as well as from small villages on the most remote islands.

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At least during its very long first part, The Black Prince, ofIris Murdoch (Dublin, 1919-Oxford, 1999), suggests a reversal of the premise of Waiting for Godot of Samuel BeckettJust as Vladimir and Estrago spend the entire play without moving from where they are because they wait in vain for someone who never arrives, Bradley Pearson, the protagonist of Murdoch's novel, a retired tax inspector, an ambitious writer but full of quirks, complexes, and frustrations, spends more than three hundred pages wanting to escape—a teacher who has wanted to write for years, but can't leave because a chain of incidents involving friends and family prevents her. Godot No one ever arrives; here, on the other hand, everyone arrives. All of this gives the novel the feel and rhythm of a frenetic tragicomic vaudeville or a sophisticated farce, with constant comings and goings, dramatic situations handled with both seriousness and humor (domestic violence, adultery, suicide attempts or announcements, drunken binges). Murdoch is a virtuoso of profound and transcendent philosophical reflection as well as of comical and absurdist sensationalism, and she is even more virtuosic at combining them. She couldn't be more British.

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"Perhaps we write to remember, but above all we remember to write," we read in Acció de gràcies for a house, the new and highly recommended book by Stefanie KremserPublished by Edicions de 1984, this is the first book written in Catalan by the author, born in Düsseldorf, raised in São Paulo, and a resident of Barcelona for over two decades. Kremser draws on the recent and traumatic memory of having to leave the apartment on Princesa Street where she lived with her husband, the writer Jordi Puntí, to reflect on the importance of having a place to live and taking care of it, whether modest or luxurious, and how a city like the Catalan capital makes it increasingly difficult for its inhabitants to do so.

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"I'm only a chameleon on the inside, not on the outside," Stefanie Kremser writes in If this street were mine, which has just been published by Edicions de 1984. Readers have been able to discover the virtues of the author of Postcard of Copacabana (Club Editor). This time, he has written a memoir in which, through all the houses he has lived in—in Europe, North America, and South America—he reflects on the "constant formation and reformation" of his identity. The chameleon who has lived and transformed himself in Germany, Brazil, Bolivia, and the United States has lived since 2003 in Barcelona, ​​"a capital without its own state," with the writer Jordi Puntí, his husband.

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With Now, in November —a novel published in 1934 during the Great Depression—, author Josephine Johnson became the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize. We read the story narrated by Marget, who tries to piece together her family's life from the time she was ten years old. We learn about the events that unfold from her perspective, and as she grows older, we get a glimpse of the increasing devastation wrought by the circumstances of the time.

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This very short and perfect novel is the fourth published by Edicions de 1984. Tessa Hadley, an English author who masterfully portrays family relationships and paints scenes set in the placidity of a Sunday afternoon that are inevitably clouded. The party It is a kind of tragedy in three acts, in the classical style, that narrates the coming-of-age of sisters, Evelyn and Moira, who are middle class and daughters of a dysfunctional marriage: the husband no longer hides that he has a mistress and the wife endures it as best she can. Sunday roastThe main English family meal: as she might say with curlers in her hair, on the verge of tears. But Tessa Hadley is the queen of alternating moments of maximum light and maximum darkness, detecting the sadness hidden in the happiest moments and the light born from the deepest tragedy. The scene immediately following the family meal, where the two daughters comb and dress their mother at a dressing table, is of exemplary beauty and elevation, made solely with combs, hairpins, and dialogues laden with subtext.

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We are what happens to us. We are what we want, we are what we lack. We are what those who love us or mistreat us make us. We are the place where we grew up. We are the places we have fled from and the places we have tried to reach. The protagonist-narrator ofWith rage in my bodyThe novel, by the French author Sorj Chalandon (1952), tells the story of a boy—a teenager, a young man: we see him grow up throughout the novel—who has suffered nothing but misfortune, who longed for a loving family but never had one, whom no one has ever loved, and whom many mistreat. In one instance, he is imprisoned in France. The institution's name is the House of Supervised Institution, and its official objective is to reform the inmates so they can work at sea or in the fields, but in practice, it is a hell where dehumanization and brutality prevail.

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"We had learned to accept our father's irrational despotism like his whiskers," says the narrator of one of the stories in Life is short, etc. (1984 Editions / Asteroide; Catalan translation by Mercè Ubach). The new book by Veronica Raimo (Rome, 1978) returns to the first person to explore lives that do not necessarily coincide with the author's own, but which often share her ironic, biting, and harsh point of view. Raimo achieved great success in Italy with the novel Nothing is true (1984, 2023 editions), which sold more than 100,000 copies and won awards such as the Viareggio and Strega Giovani. It explored the obsessions and dirty laundry of a Roman middle-class family he knew very well: his own.

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The phrase dark hour It appears several times in these two books (a novel and a collection of poems) by Quim Español (Girona, 1945). It does so on a double temporal axis: as an expression of the time of day when the sun is about to completely bury itself and, more importantly, as a metaphor for the entry into darkness of human existence. In the lyrical version, darkness is imprinted in the title itself.

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As a child, the American writer Willa Cather (1873-1947), winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, lived on a ranch in Nebraska, in the middle of the American continent, which allowed her to experience the life of the pioneers, that of those who are part of the generation of baby boom We glimpsed them in the movies that aired in the afternoon when there were only two channels. Soap operas serve, among many other things, to portray a time we haven't lived through. A lost woman We delve into the reality of towns and small cities that grew thanks to the arrival of the railroad, where winters were long and life wasn't always easy. The protagonist is Marian, an attractive woman from warm California who stands out in this socially rigid environment of rigid rules. She is married to Captain Forrester, a man respected by all and whom she loves, but she finds the place deeply boring. "You see, I have nothing to do here. I can't exercise. I don't know how to skate; we didn't skate in California, and my ankles are weak. I've always danced, in the winter; in Colorado Springs, they dance a lot. You can't imagine how much I miss it," ~BK_SLT_

Willa Cather was always interested in the position women occupied in the world, and she makes it clear here. What does a woman do when she has to live in a place where women are only allowed a discreet background if she wants something more? "When Mrs. Forrester looked at you, you immediately realized you were under her spell. It was instantaneous, it pierced the thickest armor." Sweet Water is the name of the town where they live, and it's not easy to have a promising future, or even to receive minimally interesting visitors.

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Literature can also be a refuge, especially in turbulent times. We saw this with the recovery of The plague ofAlbert Camus during the pandemic or a handful of dystopian novels during Donald Trump's first term. Once the orange plutocrat has returned to the White House, it is not surprising that, with good judgment, Edicions de 1984 – created that same year and named in homage to the eponymous novel by the English author – has wanted to expand its catalog of George Orwell (Motihari, 1903 - London, 1950) –where we already found Days in Burma (2011)— with a selection of pieces written between 1931 and 1948. The personal and, therefore, debatable selection—chosen, translated and contextualized by Pau Dito Tubau—brings together texts of diverse length, origin and interest, in which literature—whether that of third parties through reviews—is the .

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Since publishing Olive Kitteridge In 2008 –with which she won the Pulitzer and, later, the Llibreter prize–, the American Elizabeth Strout (Portland, Maine, 1956) has persisted in exploring his own fictional universe, populated by characters stunned by guilt and burdened by family setbacks, but also convinced that there must be some hope for tomorrow. Explain everything to me, published in Catalan, like the seven previous novels, in Edicions de 1984 –In her novels, translated on this occasion by Núria Busquet and Molist, Strout brings together the three great families of her sober and irremediably curious narrative about human beings: the Burgess brothers, the writer Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge, who is now ninety years old. Despite living in a community of retirees, she refuses to leave that world.

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In a book titled Ninety-nine novels. The best in English since 1939 (1984), Anthony Burgess defined this novel, first published in 1958, as "the synthesis between the traditional and the revolutionary." The structure of The bell It is traditional in style: well-prepared, it progresses in a straight chronological sense – everything happens over several days – without putting any obstacles in the way of the reader. It can even recall the plot outline of a Victorian novel, due to the rural setting, which seems inspired by a certain gothic realism, and the mixture of dramatic elements, of varied colouring, and comics, which are scarcer than the previous ones. What is revolutionary, rather, is the treatment of the characters, servants of moral themes that interested and occupied the author, also a renowned philosopher (and here I would like to take the opportunity to recommend the high-voltage conversation, recorded for the BBC in 1977, that Iris Murdoe had with the author). Philosophy & literature).

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