first published in a single volume in 1883 the stories collected in little novels of sicily are drawn from the sicily of giovanni vergas childhood reported at the time to be the poorest place in europe vergas style is swift sure and implacable he plunges into his stories almost in midbreath and tells them with a stark economy of words theres something dark and tightly coiled at the heart of each story an ironic bitter resolution that is belied by the deceptive simplicity of vergas prose and verga strikes just when the readers not expecting it translator d h lawrence surely found echoes of his own upbringing in vergas sketches of sicilian life the class struggle between property owners and tenants the relationship between men and the land and the unsentimental sometimes startlingly lyric evocation of the landscape just as lawrence veers between loving and despising the industrial north and its people so too verga shifts between affection for and ironic detachment from the superstitious uneducated downtrodden working poor of sicily if verga reserves pity for anyone or anything it is the children and the animals but he doesnt spare them in his experience it is the innocents who suffer first and last and always