The Day of Judgment: A Novel - Softcover

Satta, Salvatore

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374526605 ISBN 13: 9780374526603

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999

Synopsis

Focuses on the family of Dow Sebastiano Sanna, the leading citizen of Nuoro, Sardinia, to examine how the approach of modernity mirrors the lives and deaths of the people of the town in the first decades of the twentieth-century

About this title

Language Notes

Text: English, Italian (translation)

From Library Journal

Here are two distinctive novels from Italy written by authors of an earlier generation. Set in Satta's birthplace, Nuoro, Sardinia, at the turn of the century, The Day of Judgment portrays the family of Don Sebastiano Sanna, a notary and leading citizen of Nuoro. Satta, who is known for having rewritten the Italian penal code after World War II, was clearly exercising both his memory and his imagination in this richly evocative work: "I too," he tells us in his Epilogue, "was once a little boy, and I am beset by the memory of when I watched the whirl of the snowflakes with my nose pressed against the windowpane . . . . To know ourselves we have to live our own lives to the bitter end . . . . And even then we need someone to gather us up, to revive us, to speak about us both to ourselves and to others, as in a last judgment." While Satta's novel, which was first published, posthumously, in Italy in 1979, is reminiscent of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, Savinio's Speaking to Clio (published in 1941 and the first of Savinio's works to appear in English) may remind one of the fiction of Borges, the poetry of Apollinaire, the painting of de ChiricoSavinio's brother. In this distinctly philosophical and surrealistically episodic novel, which Savinio called "a garden for the clarity, lightness, and amenity that I acquired in my mature years," the narrator follows Charun ("he who escorts souls from this life to the other") into the past, into history, memory, dream, vision. Both these well-translated novels deserve a place in general fiction collections. Marcia G. Fuchs, Guilford Free Lib., Ct.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0374526605
• ISBN 13: 9780374526603
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 300