A perfect “novel in the form of a theater” around the figure of Grazia Deledda, the only Italian woman to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. At the center, three moments in her life decades apart: the day Grazia leaves Sardinia and everything it represents, the day she wins the most prestigious award in the world, and the day a doctor looks into her eyes to find words that won’t hurt too much. In between, her whole life. And it is by warmly following that life that this book never stops questioning itself (and us) about writing, conjugal love, the role of women, and the meaning of artistic creation.
Nuoro, 1900. Grazia is not yet thirty when she decides to move to Rome with her husband. The eternal city seems to call her, or perhaps challenge her: against her family’s advice, the young Deledda throws herself headlong into the world.
Stockholm, 1926. It is the afternoon before the Nobel Prize is awarded: in a room at the Grand Hôtel, husband and wife tenderly discuss, both amazed, how life has brought them to the threshold of that glorious day.
Rome, 1935. In a radiology office, a doctor tries to find the right words to communicate to a woman (who has made words her strength) the ferocity of the disease that will take her away in a year.
Marcello Fois illuminates three decisive moments in the life of the author of Canne al vento, giving us a story of unbeatable vocation, of absolute tenacity, of blind faith in the power of writing. A passionate tribute to an author who has been undervalued for too long, and who, when read today, reveals all her disruptive contemporaneity.
