Eesti Raamat publishes Verga’s The Malavoglia Family

Publisher Eesti Raamat has released Giovanni Verga’s novel The Malavoglia Family in Estonian, ERR reports. The book appears in the Hieronymus series and was translated from Italian by Janek Jõgi.

The novel tells the tragic story of the Malavoglia family, who live in the Sicilian fishing village of Aci Trezza. The head of the family, the patriarch ’Ntoni, tries to improve their financial situation by investing in a risky shipment of lupin beans.

When the boat carrying the cargo and a member of the family sinks in a storm, a chain of events begins that leads to the family’s slow but inevitable decline. The novel follows their struggle against debt, the forces of nature, fate and the pressures of a changing world.

Verga was an Italian writer and one of the leading representatives of verismo. His works depicted life in his native Sicily and among the farmers, fishermen and residents of provincial towns of southern Italy. His realistic social criticism was combined with naturalism, particularly the influence of Émile Zola.

Verga studied law at the University of Catania but used money from his father intended for his studies to publish his first book, I Carbonari della Montagna. He initially wrote historical novels. After moving from Sicily to Florence in 1869 and later to Milan, he wrote most of his work there.

From 1874, Verga shifted from urban love stories to writing about the lives of Sicily’s poor and sought objectivity in his work. His best-known work is the short story Cavalleria rusticana, or Rustic Chivalry, published in the collection Vita dei campi, or Country Life. Pietro Mascagni based his opera Cavalleria rusticana on the story; it premiered in 1890. Verga’s short-story collection Rustic Chivalry was published in Estonian in 1993.