NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN

The concluding volume of the trilogy which began with the famous Mill on the Po takes up the pasan to Italy's impoverished little citizenry from about the year 1870 and carries it to the end of World War I. Cecilia, tricked into marriage with the shiftless, evil Gluseppe, has seen her husband go mad and reduced to an imbecile when, in the present story, she sets to the task of rearing six children and wresting a livelihood from two mills which are constantly engulfed by floods and excise taxes. The littleness of his creations, the elementary force of their passions, the steady attrition of petty happenings and frustrations upon their limited aims in life-- Riccardo Bacchelli deliberately works sparingly with these spare materials, always seeking to narrow himself closer to the sources of human action, and the chemistry from which political and social values are compounded. He plunges into the struggle of the hardy but not very flexible peasants to adapt to the concepts of strikes and boycotts, socialism, anarchy-- their struggle of the spirit and imagination to meet a life for which they were never made. This saga resembles Hemingway more than Galsworthy, and Chekhov more than Hemingway, and is a work of stature. The previous volumes will have limned your market.