Salvatore Satta’s The Day of Judgement is a wonderful book, as warm and pleasant as the hills and valleys of Sardinia it takes as its setting. More than that, it is a classic, without a shadow of a doubt. I enjoyed last week’s Satantango more, but as much as I loved it, it is a book destined for people who read, more than people who live. If I go around the country homes of my friends the books that I find there will not be by Joyce, or Woolf, or Beckett, but rather Austen, Hardy, and Kipling. These latter group are no better or worse than the first, but they bring with them a prose that is simple, clear, and a vehicle for their books’ plots, instead of anything deliberately striving to be more. They are not, in a primary sense, experimenters. And one day, perhaps, they may be joined on their shelves by Salvatore Satta’s The Day of Judgement too.
A Classic, for Better or Worse
Pots and pots of ink have dried up in trying to explain what a literary classic is. With The Day of Judgement I simply had a feeling, as I was reading, of something ineffable, indescribable. It had, I would say, a certain bearing about itself. The book is not long, but it carries itself like an elder statesman. This may be in part because Salvatore Satta started writing it when he was almost seventy, after a long career as a jurist. There is no sense of rushing or urgency about the pages, no matter what the author himself felt as he was writing them. It is a book of anecdotes, of spilling digressions, written by an old man about his home. And – and this is what is so rare in our times, when modernism, modern science, and worst of all the horrors of the Second World War, broke that particularly Victorian self-assurance that let us preach what we believed without self-question – it has the gravitas and casual wisdom of someone who has lived, and wishes to share their experience with others. Whether you like him or not, it reminds me of Steinbeck at his best.
Chronicle of a Town
To call this a novel is wrong. It is more a chronicle than a novel, or perhaps a story in Benjamin’s sense. Its heart is the town of Nuoro, in central Sardinia, and Don Sebastiano Sanna Carboni, a nobleman who lives and works there. For a period of perhaps twenty years his life and the life of his village is followed and recounted by the narrator, an older man trying to remember and record his past. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect, place, or person from among the village’s seven thousand. We meet schoolteachers, priests, swindlers, shepherds, and learn about making wine, or about the potential origins of the village, or the design of the houses. Moments such as electrification of street lamps, or the first arrival of radical political ideas, are recounted with tenderness and honesty. But as the book progresses, and the world itself “progresses”, there come about ever more challenges to this once so isolated mountain village, and its way of life.
A “Truth” to Challenge – the Themes
Through the way that the old man recounts his “truth” The Day of Judgement further gains the regalia of a true classic. Because of its structure, with each chapter detailing a different event, or the struggles of a different man or woman, there is an extraordinary thematic variety within these pages. The conflicts between husbands and wives, between fathers and sons, between nobles and the lower orders, between conservatives and socialists, between individuals and the state, between the church and the common man, between teachers and students, are all described. Each side is given its say, and in such a way that I can already sense that this is one of those books which like a seed grow with time and the experiences of their readers. One day I may well support the fathers, instead of the sons, even if today that is not entirely the case. The “truth” of the narrator doesn’t mean a domineering world view, but rather a series of suggestions and opinions which can be challenged or accepted, but are not meant by any stretch of the imagination to be absolute.
Progress – What Good is it?
Part of this comes from the fundamental tension at the heart of the book – between the desire for progress and the inherent conservatism of humankind. I don’t think Satta himself truly knew where he lay in this battle – and this is part of the book’s greatness. Though the narrator himself at one point says that “there is nothing I detest so much as the past”, the evidence of the book tells a different story. The “Day of Judgement” of the book’s title refers not only to the fate of humankind before God in some strands of Christian theology, but also to the role of the writer here. Satta’s narrator admits that he is reviving the dead of his own past and history, from the early twentieth century and a little before, and making them give an account for themselves before the reader. And we are supposed to judge for ourselves whether these men and women, living in the village, have lived their lives badly or well. The narrator can only show us who they were – the rest is up to us.
Nostalgia for a World now Lost
A plaintive nostalgia pervades the book. A longing for a world which was only Nuoro, or at least a world which ended at the sea. Nuoro is a place, for Don Sebastiano, “where there was room for everyone” and the way that the book goes through each of the characters and professions, the very nature of the book’s ordered structure, formally reflects a stability and certainty about life and one’s place in it. Yet there is also an occasional lyricism too, notably in chapter V’s lavish description of making bread, which has “all the solemnity of a ritual”, and then later on when discussing “the pagan mystery” of the vineyard. Here the prose itself takes on the same magical quality of its subject matter, and it’s hard not to want to be there yourself, hard at work on the fields or kneading dough.
Through work there comes a sense of community and continuity. People visit each other, sit and play cards together or simply chat in a way that is alien to much of the modern world with its hustle and bustle. It is from a time before time, before precision. It is a stasis of a positive sort, which is differentiated from the present most strikingly by the hope of parents that their children will live (as Don Sebastiano hopes) just the same life as their parents – that they may be just as lucky in having such a good life, instead of eternally striving after a better one. It ties in with the religious argument in the work – that we should see the blessedness of our own lives, rather than in their potentiality.
The Sympathy of a Great Soul
It is his unbounded sympathy, too, that shows Satta as an earnest writer. He cares for all of his characters, from the grimiest urchins to the nobles like Don Sebastiano. It means that whenever progress seems almost inevitable, he is always willing to show kindness towards those it does not benefit, such as the canons who are forbidden to ring the church bells for the beginning of school by a new arrival from outside of the town. The cessation of the bells is one of the saddest moments of the book, because it represents a huge loss of pride and self-respect for the canons. With the ending of the bells’ song, there is also a hidden but no less important loss for the townsfolk of a part of their identity, and when we are told that “the bell rope hung sadly above Ziu Longu’s bench, like the rope after a hanging”, it’s hard not to think that the image is supposed to call to mind the small death inside their souls too.
What Does Modernity Mean?
What modernity means is a loss of the sanctity of the world, a loss of music, a loss of community. It means problems, for “Problems, of whatever kind, arise when the simple, humble certainties of life begin to fail”. Alongside the loss of the bells, another poignant image of the end of street lighting in the village. Before the introduction of electricity, a man would go around lighting the oil lamps, one by one. Behind him, we are told, would follow the town’s children, playing a game between them of trying to catch as many of the spent matches as possible. It is a stupid, childish game, but what it means is community.
Electrification “was destiny itself” but that hardly stops it from being a force for the destruction of the sacred past. The narrator once again deploys a characteristically reticent phrase for when the lights first turn on all at once: for the town “in some mysterious way felt that it had entered history”. It is up to us, again, to decide whether history means good or ill. But it’s hard to avoid the ominous note that creeps into the prose. “The north wind had risen, and the bulbs hanging in their shades in the Corso began to sway sadly, light and shadow, shadow and light, making the night-time nervous. This had not happened with the oil lamps”.
Tragedy of the Present: the Invention of Politics
With modernity also comes politics. Sardinia, on the periphery of Italy, has never been historically important, and Nuoro, at its centre, even less so. But one day, the narrator says, the younger generation started reading Avanti!, a radical socialist paper, and politics arrived in the village. The old certainties of life – that people stayed in their social positions and jobs, that there was a kind of harmony between all walks of life – suddenly begin to be questioned. People, told of inequality, begin to believe in it, and conflicts that had not even been conceivable a hundred years earlier, now take pride of place. Whether they are rightly motivated or not is less important here than the fact that they undermine the conservative feeling of the world as organised and correct as it is. They suggest change where hitherto it wouldn’t even have been a concept.
Politics is all well and good in theory, but in practice something else happens. The movement is co-opted by a certain Don Ricciotti, a man who feels that Don Sebastiano has done him wrong by buying Riccioti’s father’s house at auction when the latter was dealing with bankruptcy. Using his talent for giving speeches Ricciotti is able to gain a sizable support base in the town, just as elections are coming up. He hopes to use the power of office to force Don Sebastiano to return to him the house that he considers his by right. In these speeches, Don Sebastiano is targeted by name as one of the swindlers who is oppressing the poor, hardworking citizens of Nuoro, though there is no evidence elsewhere in the book that this is the case. The story serves as a grave indictment of the dangers of populism, wherever it may be found, and it is only by luck and hard work that ultimately Ricciotti’s efforts are thwarted. Perhaps what Satta wants to say here is that the world would be better off without politics, and the manipulation and deceit that seemingly has to come with it.
The Problems of the Past I – Woman’s Place
Yet for all this uncertainty, for all this scepticism towards the various changes in his own life, the narrator cannot turn his back on the future, and neither does he blind us to the acute problems of the past. Perhaps the most fully fleshed out character, and the most tragic, of the story is Don Sebastiano’s wife, Donna Vincenza. She is described as intelligent, but the society that she is in massively restricts her freedoms: she’s barely even allowed outside of her own house. The chapters centring on her life are filled with gloom and despair, and she is repeatedly described as “trapped”. The lives of the other women are no better. Those who engage in prostitution, for example, are forced to go to another village to give birth or otherwise deal with illegitimate offspring. The implications reveal a misery and disquiet underlying the apparent peace of the past. It is a man’s peace only.
Problems of the Past II – the Dark Side of Stasis
And it is not only the women who suffer here. The darker side of stasis is sometimes revealed when The Day of Judgement touches upon poverty. The book is not critical of poverty per se, and certainly not overly critical about the rigid social classes found within Nuoro which likely perpetuate it, but there are moments when the beautiful, structured façade of Sardinian life in the book suddenly shows its cracks. The moment that struck me most strongly was one of morbid horror. Near the end of the book the summer’s weather becomes unnaturally violent with strong winds and as a result a plague sets in among the fields of the countryside. The lands of almost everybody are left severely damaged – everybody’s lands except those of Don Sebastiano, that is.
When he goes to inspect his fields he meets the peasants who have been looking after them, and they are eager to explain to him why they are undamaged. But to his dismay and disgust they reveal that it is all due to a crucified dog and left hanging on the door of their hut. Don Sebastiano is left speechless and full of rage. The superstitions which at other times make for proof of the magic of the past are now transformed into something monstrous and unnerving. When the peasants then mention a problem with the peasants of the neighbouring farm, Don Sebastiano tells them to sort it out among themselves. And they do, with an axe in the dead of night. The book reminds us that for all the good things that have undoubtedly been lost with progress and time, much has been gained too. The end to the mindless violence, black superstition, and the rise of modern medicine are all things to be rightly praised.
Conclusion – The Judgement
Salvatore Satta did not finish The Day of Judgement, but the ending is in no way abrupt – instead, it finishes on an elegiac note that ties the whole work together. The chronicler could well have reckoned up every single soul of Nuoro’s then seven thousand, and no doubt would have, had they lived that long, but we should be grateful for all the pages that we have. It is a beautiful, lovely, and kind book that stands to my mind for everything the best literature can be. It is exciting, hopeful, and timeless. Read it again and again. I know I will.
For more about the ambiguous development of modernity in rural communities, have a look at my thoughts on Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo.
Picture of Salvatore Satta is in the public domain
Picture of Nuoro houses by Max.oppo [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
Picture of Landscape around Nuoro also by Max.oppo