Description
From Italy, a luminous novel that swept all the major literary prizes there and became a big best-seller a beautifully crafted nineteenth-century family saga, written with all the intelligence and discipline of a twentieth-century sensibility.
Spanning the hundred years between the end of the eighteenth century and 1900, The Dust Roads of Monferrato is Rosetta Loy's fascinating account of four generations of a farming family in Piedmont, Italy a story marked by births, deaths, wars, peri ods of poverty, tragedy and love.
Yet this is a family chronicle of a different order, for in spite of its breadth and scope the innumerable dramas, the violence, the adulterous passions, the battles, the lives lost.
The Dust Roads of Monferrato is told almost without dialogue in a quiet, detached style that carries far greater conviction than the more familiar direct narrative.
In shimmering writing that is highly visual, the novel concerns the descen dants of "the Great Masten," who made enough money to buy his own land, animals, and hastily built farmhouse and left them all to his two sons-one a golden-haired dreamer and musician who dies young, the other a fierce, practical man, an adven turer in Napoleon's armies who must come home to save the farm from ruin.
An elegant novel, superbly written and translated: the American debut of a powerful new voice in Italian literature
ISBN:0394588495
