Giuseppe Dessì

It is possible to explore Sardinia through the works of great authors, Sardinian and foreign. Each of them will tell about a Special Island (Lawrence, Vittorini, Wagner, Levi, Edwardes, Valery, Tyndale, for mentioning some of them) and a tormented Island (anyway real, fictionalized and suggestive, as that told by great Sardinian writers). Giuseppe Dessì is one of Sardinian authors who personified more than others this second way of describing the Island.

Sardinia described by him is authentic, modest and characterized by daily rhythms. A land that is simultaneously archaic and full of strong passions and conflicts. Dessì is a writer very loved not only for his intellectual honesty and for his literary prominence, but also because he was able to represent well the feeling of eternal love and hate by Sardinian to their land.


In the novels and in the tales by Dessì, from The Deserter in San Silvano, from The bride in the town to The paper dancer, from She was water to Village of shadows – this one is his great masterpiece and, through it, he won the Award Strega in 1972 and it is also the cornerstone of the whole Sardinian literature – we find, through more or less marked hues, the theme of solitude and the most genuine, spontaneous and sincere feature of this land.


Harsh, hard, with sudden storm and a long drought; with ancestral superstitions and eternal grief; with immense landscapes, hates celebrated as virtues, proverbial revenges, the secret housewife’s field, the lonely pastoral field of man, the great loves and the great waits. Reading the masterpiece by Dessì, Village of shadows, is like throwing by yourself in a world where all of this is alternated. You can have the live perception of loving a small universe that does not exist anymore; so you can have the unconscious desire of keeping it in life. Above all, in this novel there is everything of a life: love, death, happiness, pain, bravery and fear.


Dessì composes a refined plot and makes this historic novel as his most precious bequest. An immortal village that permanently lives in memory. Telling the history of a family, on the background of the most extended history of the village, of the Island and of the Country, is a project that has famous prior events and Village of shadows is an extraordinary historic novel. The deeds of a family and of a small village surprised in all its clearness and centrality, because as Dessì teaches to us, through his assertion, alike the Spinoza’s ideas, “Each point of the World is the middle of the World too”.


After about forty years since his death, the educating by Dessì represents a great modernity for Sardinian people. The idea that he had about his Island, put in the middle of own existence, has a position that is more intense in the difficult current context: “We Sardinian have an absurd way of loving our land, like we have already lost it or like we must lose it fatally”.