In the Library
Mastro-don Gesualdo
Giovanni Verga, 1889
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 9 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by D. H. Lawrence (1923)
- Original
- Original it
- Chapters
- Chapters 21
- Length
- Length 121k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Where are the riches of the house of Trao gone!
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
The reading guide, in the app
How to Read Mastro-don Gesualdo
The crowded town and Lawrence's odd English are only the front door, and once you start watching who is let in and who is kept out, the novel turns clear and very hard to put down.
Mastro-don Gesualdo arrives with the reputation of a school text, the grey Italian realist novel a generation was made to summarise, and neither that reputation nor its crowded first pages tell you what the book is like to read. Verga planned it as the second of five novels in what he called the Cycle of the Vanquished, a ladder of the struggle to get on that was meant to climb from the poorest fishermen to the worlds of politics and art, and he finished only two. This one takes Gesualdo Motta, a bricklayer in a small Sicilian town, and follows him while work and land make him one of the richest men for miles; he marries Bianca Trao for her old name, the risings of 1848 find him on the side of property, and he dies alone in his daughter's palace in Palermo, despised by the servants.