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Sardinian Silver 
by A. Colin Wright
To Arthur Fraser, a young Englishman, Sardinia in 1960 is perfect. It's an island filled
with Roman ruins, exotic scenery, local customs, and morally traditional values-he loves everything. To assimilate
into the strange and belong to a society different from his own has always been his desire. Arthur arrives
in the resort town of Alghero to work as a representative for a tourist company. His ambition is to find a
Sard girl for himself. He is quickly thwarted, though, by the orthodox beliefs of the inhabitants. Unmarried
couples cannot meet without chaperones, and anyone with "continental" attitudes is immoral. Arthur
quickly learns that dating is fraught with real dangers. When Arthur finally falls in love with Anna, a Sard
girl, he discovers that she lives in Rome and is no longer accepted at home. But she then falls in love with
one of his best friends, and Arthur becomes irrationally obsessed. He incessantly schemes about winning back
her affections, despite her efforts to dissuade him. In Sardinian Silver, author Wright masterfully evokes
a mysterious society, its flamboyant people, and the Island's beauty. Like Arthur, you'll never want to leave
Sardinia, with its wide sands, low hills, sun, and blue sea and its superficial pleasantness of life.
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price and order information)
The Day of Judgment
by Salvatore Satta, Patrick Creagh (Translator)
Slowly, from cobbled path to pastureland to overarching mountain, the ancient town of
Nuoro in Sardinia emerges as the chief player in this singular, profoundly intelligent, superbly translated
novel. If one man can be said to stand taller than the rest, it is Don Sebastiano, the notary, who, though
he has labored hard for 50 years amassing vineyards, wheat fields and oil presses, is not rich, because "only
the cemetery is rich." And indeed as each of his seven sons leaves the town for the university, seeking money,
fame, status, Sebastiano mocks their search for "bread made of something better than wheat." For he knows
that even if they don't remain in Nuoro, the town will remain in them, as it has in all the peasants, shepherds
and landowners who figure in the narrative, whose sorrows, grudges and centuries-old habits distinguish them
so precisely that the reader can hear their voices. A tenuous yet shattering plot, generated by the hatred
of schoolteacher Don Ricciotti for Don Sebastiano, takes shape toward the end. Ricciotti galvanizes the countryside,
forms a new political party, stands for election, charges Sebastiano with murder. This wise and glowing novel
has been widely read in Europe since its publication in 1979.
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price and order information)
D.H. Lawrence and Italy: Twilight in Italy, Sea and Sardinia, Etruscan
Places (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
by D. H. Lawrence, Anthony Burgess
Amazon Reader's review: "If I were to read only two travel books then this would be the
second one, although both my wife and an English friend read it in German translation and reported that it
was terrible. Maybe it doesn't translate well. Lawrence, as young man, describes a thread running through
his life as he starts the journey by heading south toward Italy on foot from Bavaria with Frida, a way of
travel that many Germans still understand very well. Descriptions of people are attractive, like the one-legged
Italian who tried to seduce the cold, northern women at a dance. I liked best his description of his own Alpüberquerung,
his description therein of the hurried English hiker, the way that Italians have ruined the alpine valleys
with industrialization. And I felt loss at his growing distance from Frida. The book made me want to see the
lemon and olive trees above Lago di Garda and the villages high above the lake, but we haven't done that in
spite of our nearness to the region. Gardasee is completely overrun by German tourists now, not just by those
wearing heavy hiking boots."
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an excerpt, as well as price and order information)
