Cosima

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About Cosima

Product Description Short description: "Cosima" tells the story of an aspiring writer growing up in Nuoro, Sardinia during the last decades of the nineteenth century when formal education for women was rare and literary careers unheard-of. Based on Deledda’s own life, the work describes a young woman’s struggle against the dismay and disapproval of her family and friends at her creative ambitions. Yet it also reads like a charming fable with details of family life, rural traditions and wild bandits, and it is as much a novel of memory as of character or action. Deledda’s characters are poor country folk driven by some predetermined force. Their loves are tragic, their lives as hard and as rigidly controlled as nature itself in the hills of Sardinia. Deledda creates memorable figures who play out their lives against this backdrop of mountains and bare plains, sheepfolds and vineyards. Shimmering in the distance is the sea and escape — for a few — to the Continent or America. In 1926 Grazia Deledda became the second woman and the second Italian to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. She wrote thirty-three novels, including "Reeds in the Wind," and many books of short stories, almost all set on Sardinia. Her work has become well known to English-speaking readers through Martha King’s translations for Italica Press. Review "A unique and supremely satisfying portrait of the artist as a young girl." -- Belles Lettres, Spring 1990 "King's translation is crisp and clear. Grazia Deledda is one of the most important women writers of the twentieth century. [This] translation will go far in helping redress the neglect of an important feminine voice in twentieth-century narrative." -- Italica, AATI, 66.1, Spring 1989 "This autobiographical novel sets forth a young girl's struggle to break family and village traditions, become educated, and be a writer." -- Ms., May/June 1992 Cosima is the fictionalized autobiography of Grazia Deledda, the first Italian woman to win a Nobel Prize for Literature (1926). Focusing on her early life in rural Sardinia, the novel mixes realism with the perceptions of young Cosima to show a world both terrible and wonderful. Cosima is part of a large family full of tragedy: her scholarly eldest brother becomes an alcoholic, her father dies, another brother manages the family interests but keeps most of the income for himself. Cosima carries on, finding beauty and learning about life. Her first story is published in a fashion magazine; encouraged, she steals a liter of oil from the cellar to pay the postage to submit her first novel manuscript, which is accepted. Her payment is a hundred copies, "and the big package plummeted into the house like a meteorite. Her mother was frightened by it, walking around it evenings with the fearful distrust of a dog that sees a strange animal." As Cosima oversees the family oil-pressing mill, she hears the stories of the peasants: "genuine people, hard-working and gentle who, even if they could get their claws on the little bit belonging to their neighbors ... would do it sparingly and then go to confession." She stops writing romances and concentrates on Sardinia - a place where myth melds with grinding reality, where a woman can fall in love with a sheep and bandits come to your door, and where everyone gossips about that strange little Cosima, who writes. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out . -- From ; review by Erica Bauermeister From the Publisher Cosima reads like a charming fable with details of family life, folk tales and wild bandits; and it is full of vivid images of this Mediterranean landscape and its people. From the Author To judge by the number of her books still in print in Italy, Grazia Deledda's novels have retained their appeal and value. Perhaps one reason is that they are about a world and people that no longer exist. But also Deledda's works, despite their now exotic location and distance in time, do not seem dated. Her e