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A review by briandice
The Church of Solitude by Grazia Deledda
4.0
The final book published during the lifetime of a mostly forgotten Nobel prize winning author, The Church of Solitude is a carefully constructed work of self imposed loneliness and religious-fueled isolation of the soul. Care-filled because the author is a master at the craft and the narrative never tilts towards maudlin or melodrama; the protagonist is constructed with such fine tuning the Reader is clear by the end of the story that she has been created by someone who craved solitude to the point of reverence.
Deledda isn't just a forgotten Modernist author some 100 years after her works on life in Sardinia were published, she was neglected in her own time and nearly forgotten by her own country at the time of her death (the newspapers in Rome took days to note her passing). But learning more about her life it seems that she preferred it this way - Deledda constructed battlements and moats against the world to retain her reclusiveness, a position her protagonist in this novel strives to achieve. We are told in the opening words of the book that our heroine has just had a mastectomy and things look bleak; it's what Deledda does over the next 180 pages that impresses both as a rich story and a testament to the power of strong women in a man's world.
Deledda isn't just a forgotten Modernist author some 100 years after her works on life in Sardinia were published, she was neglected in her own time and nearly forgotten by her own country at the time of her death (the newspapers in Rome took days to note her passing). But learning more about her life it seems that she preferred it this way - Deledda constructed battlements and moats against the world to retain her reclusiveness, a position her protagonist in this novel strives to achieve. We are told in the opening words of the book that our heroine has just had a mastectomy and things look bleak; it's what Deledda does over the next 180 pages that impresses both as a rich story and a testament to the power of strong women in a man's world.