Fate in Sicily

THE HOUSE BY THE MEDLAR TREE (247 pp.) -- Giovanni Verga -- Grove Press ($3.50).

"Giovanni Verga, the Sicilian novelist and playwright, is surely the greatest writer of Italian fiction after Manzoni," said D. H. Lawrence. Between the two,'born half a century apart, runs the great divide of 19th century European literature, on the one side romanticism, on the other realism. If Manzoni is Italy's Hugo, Verga is its Flaubert, and its Zola too. Now the finest of Verga's novels, I Malavoglia, is introduced to U.S. readers as The House by the Medlar Tree. The Malavoglia are a family of boatmen. Verga's is the plain tale of their destruction by fate.

A Cargo Lost to the Sea. It was the

sea that first rose against the Malavoglia. Bastianazzo, the father of the family, was drowned in a storm and the Malavoglia boat was lost.

"What a misfortune!" they said in the street. "And the boat was loaded!"--with a cargo worth more than 500 lire, a vast sum to simple fishermen. The owner of the cargo could sooner have gathered figs from thistles than money from these destitutes; but in loyalty to their code of honor the Malavoglia would not shirk the debt. "We are ruined," said Grandfather 'Ntoni quietly--and began with all his humble means to resist the fact.

The boat was raised, repaired, but before it could be sent to sea again, one of Bastianazzo's three sons was killed while serving in the navy. "Every wind," people said, "is contrary to a broken ship." Final payment of the debt had to be postponed again & again. "Long things turn into snakes,", the neighbors were saying. In the end they were right; the owner of the lost cargo foreclosed, and the Malavoglia lost their heart's ease at day's end--the house by the medlar tree.

The Price of Anchovies. A well-to-do villager had already broken off his son's engagement with Mena, the eldest Malavoglia girl; the shipwright now ordered his daughter to stop seeing young 'Ntoni, Mena's brother. Grandfather 'Ntoni only drove the fishing harder. The neighbors said he was "hunting for trouble with a candlestick." One night he found it. The boom fell in a bad storm and struck his head. 'Ntoni and Alessi, his little brother, barely got the boat ashore; Grandfather 'Ntoni was laid up for months.

No sooner was he well than cholera struck. It killed so many people in Sicily that the price of anchovies dropped disastrously. Grandfather Malavoglia had to sell the boat.

In the end, young 'Ntoni sank to the running of contraband, stabbed the local policeman in a brawl and was sentenced to five years at hard labor. Dishonored by her brother's crime, the younger sister ran away and became a prostitute; the elder stayed home to be an old maid. The old man died in the poorhouse. Alessi and the girl he loved, Nunziata, were left to rebuild the family's fortunes. "The house of the Malavoglia is destroyed'' a neighbor said in epitaph. "Cursed be the fate that led to so many misfortunes."

The Author. Giovanni Verga was born in Catania, Sicily, in 1840. At 16 he wrote his first novel--unprintable. At 22 he had another, I Carbonari delta Montagna, in four volumes, and persuaded his father to stand the printer's bill. At 25 he went to Florence and began to put forth the kind of lily literature that well-born ladies watered with their tears. At 34, sick of it all, he wrote an honest story, Nedda, about the life and hard times of a Sicilian peasant girl.

Verga had found his hand. For the next 20 years he used it resolutely, breaking his harsh tales from the native rock of Sicilian society. The critics called him the father of Verismo, Italian naturalism, and especially prized his short stories. One of them, Cavalleria Rusticana, was used for the libretto of Mascagni's opera. From his middle 50s on, Verga wrote little and lived quietly until his death in 1922, at 82.

In I Malavoglia, Verga struck his full range. Peasant life has never been more feelingly sketched, even by Chekhov. Amazingly, too, for all its tolling theme, the book is full of a tinkling gaiety--Sicilians crack jokes at funerals to make everybody feel better. Ultimately, the gaiety only makes the effect more ghastly, for the reader comes to realize that what Verga believes he is conducting, from the depths of his unrelieved pessimism, is the larger funeral of human hope.

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