The House by the Medlar Tree

The Toscanos of Aci Trezza are known to everyone in the village as the Malavoglia, the ill-willed ones, which is a village joke since they never stop working. They own a boat, a house by the medlar tree, and a decent name, and over the course of Verga’s 1881 novel they lose all three. It begins with a cargo of lupins bought on credit and a storm that wrecks the boat and drowns a son, and from there the debts, deaths, and broken engagements arrive one after another while the neighbors watch and comment. Verga built his prose out of village speech and let the community do much of the narrating, which made this the founding work of Italian verismo. D. H. Lawrence thought enough of him to translate him. Free PDF and EPUB edition here.