9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What? I didn't recommend this book earlier?, September 24, 1999
This is a must read - brilliantly written. Although the story line - love between unequals, forced separation etc. - may sound trite, Sparrow is anything but trite. The writing is tightly crafted in a style that is very contemporary - I was surprised that the author was not a contemporary of Tabucchi, et. al. Do give this book a try.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Exquisite and Heartbreaking, February 16, 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: Sparrow: The Story of a Songbird (Paperback)
Giovanni Verga wrote several novels that were, at their essence, Sicilian family sagas. Sparrow is not one the them. Instead, this exquisite miniature is an intimate psychological portrait of one young girl, a girl destined to become a nun against her wishes, a portrait of her one and only summer of happiness and the ultimate tragedy that underscores her life.
The plot of this lovely novella could have so easily degenrated into pure, unvarnished sentimentality in the hands of an author less talented than Verga. Verga's descriptions of the people, of the Sicilian countryside, of convent life, as well as his use of third person narration, are so convincing, so full of sharp edges, that we can't help but believe they are real.
Boosting the book's credibility, however, is the undeniable fact that Catholic Europe often sent its unwanted sons and daughters to both monasteries and convents. This was simply cruel social reality; whether or not the child in question actually had a religious vocation was deemed superfluous. Sicily was the last to abandon this inhumane practice and, as a result, it's convents became little more than rceptacles of human refuse: filthy, overcrowded buildings that housed unwilling, but desperate, residents.
It would seem that Verga's story has some basis in fact. Some of his aunts were nuns and his mother, Donna Caterina, a member of the minor nobility, had been convent educated. She, herself, told Verga the story of a young girl who lived in a convent in the "madowman's cell," a place from which were heard shrieks, moans and ungodly bursts of inhuman laughter.
Set in 1854, Sparrow depicts a Sicily ravaged by the cholera epidemic. The emotions depicted in the book are both organized and feverish and it is to Verga's credit that he keeps them from spilling over into melodrama.
The story, itself, is told in a series of letters. These letters begin rationally enough but they soon begin to be filled with madness...the madness of an absolute love that could never be.
Simple and poetic, Sparrow tells a horrifying tale that so easily could have slipped into the cliche, yet happily doesn't. A wonderful study of a life gone so terrible wrong.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Forever relevant, August 7, 2001
This review is from: Sparrow: The Story of a Songbird (Paperback)
This book has the power of transporting the reader into the life of the main character and making him/her sympathize with Maria. However individual her particular condition may be (fortunately, not many women are forced into convents nowadays), her story goes beyond the specific events to symbolize the idea of being forced into the wrong vocation, being denied freedom of choice and the extreme consequences of psychological violence.
An immediate classic since its first publication, it strikes a chord with people worldwide since almost everyone has sooner or later lived through a predicament that felt similar in principle to Maria's. Highly recommended. I've already read it twice.
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