Aust, US, Canada: migrant & native experiences; Films: Amazon.com: Padre Padrone, My Father, My Master: Gavino Ledda, George Salmanazar: Books

Amazon.com: Padre Padrone, My Father, My Master: 9780893960032: Gavino Ledda, George Salmanazar: Books

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Padre Padrone, Education of a shepherd

My Father, My Master Hardcover – May 1, 1980
German Edition by Gavino Ledda (Author), George Salmanazar (Translator)
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 281 ratings
3.9 on Goodreads
480 ratings

"It's mine: I need it in the countryside": the words with which Abraham snatches his son from school to force him to look after a flock of sheep in the mountains sound like a definitive condemnation.

From that day it will be solitude, hard work and the harsh and wild nature of Sardinia that will teach Gavino about life:
from an illiterate child, then a silent soldier among the continentals during the military service,
he will graduate thanks to an unshakable determination, without ever deny love for nature, its first confidant.

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Print length 232 pages
Language German
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Customer reviews
4.2 out of 5 stars

John Peiffer
5.0 out of 5 stars Helpful Background For English Readers To Understand Some Of The Culture Of The IslandReviewed in the United States on September 23, 2015
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I read this book in Italy when it was first published. now I have a companion version for my English readers to borrow when we talk about the subject.
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Dienina Casta
5.0 out of 5 stars highly recommendedReviewed in Germany on July 6, 2014
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I was very moved by Gavino Ledda's autobiographical descriptions of his childhood/youth as the son of a tyrannical father in Sardinia. He received no school education whatsoever and had to work hard as a shepherd in a valley remote from the village from his early childhood in the 1940s. He has hardly any social contacts, not even with his family, and has neither an appropriate childhood nor adolescence. Eventually he frees himself from his father's clutches and through hard work he goes from being illiterate to being a university lecturer.

At first I wasn't sure whether I wanted to read the book because I thought it was another Mediterranean shepherd's story about the hard life, but the story increasingly captivated me with its intensity and the descriptions of this almost medieval-looking, bitterly poor life in the world second half of the 20th century in Europe moved me very much. The way the father deals with his son is difficult to understand, but it is certainly not an isolated fate in this world.

I was fascinated by how Ledda finally went his way and I had to keep reminding myself that all of this actually happened, which made the story even more worth reading and haunting for me. It is also interesting to note how difficult it is to change such circumstances, how much people cling to the old ways and how problematic it is to free oneself from one's environment, because although Ledda has an amazing path in life, he cannot really break away.

I realized once again how lucky I was with my childhood and the external circumstances, something that should be remembered from time to time, if it is the case.

A book very worth reading.
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euripides50
4.0 out of 5 stars Brutal saga of Sardinian pastoralismReviewed in Germany on June 12, 2017
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Anyone who has fun on the islands of the Mediterranean today rarely considers how poor and hopeless life on these islands was relatively recently.

This is particularly true for the large island of Sardinia, where, even after the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of people and their families had to languish on the brink of starvation. This book is about such a family, more precisely about the eldest son and the father, the Padre Padrone. The son is none other than the author who wrote this book about the traumatic experiences of his childhood and youth.
The book begins with a drastic life decision for little Gavino. Gavino, who has just started school, is taken out of school by his father because his work is needed for the family to survive. First, as a toddler at the age of five or six, he has to look after the sheep in the freezing cold and protect them from bandits and wild animals. Many of his peers who, like Gavino, are called in for these services freeze to death in the freezing cold nights, and Gavino also barely survives the first winter. His further teaching covers the entire spectrum of agricultural activities: sowing, harvesting, transporting, cutting, chopping wood, digging earth, milking, and all of this in such abundance that there is hardly any time left to sleep.

The inhuman severity with which Gavino's father punishes even the smallest mistake is hardly comprehensible for the modern reader. The father shows no parental affection because he only passes on the violence that he experienced from his father.

The mood between the individual shepherd families in the village is even more hostile. Nobody trusts anyone else, everyone steals and lies wherever they can. The servants are so poorly fed that they have to steal sheep to avoid starving. The forms of expression of sexuality among young men are inhumane; no sheep or chicken is spared.

All of this is described in the first 175 pages of the book with shocking vividness and such great linguistic power that you can hardly tear yourself away from reading it. A brutally realistic saga of Sardinian pastoralism unfolds before the reader's eyes, a world away from the idyllic coziness of the Sardinian Nobel Prize winner Grazia Deledda, who left Sardinia as a child and spent her entire life fantasizing about a false rural idyll in Sardinia.
In the end, Gavino Ledda manages to break out of this vicious circle against all odds - through education. Against his father's wishes, he joined the army and received an elementary education that would later allow him to continue studying and eventually writing. In the end, when Gavino is 24, he is emancipated from his father, simply because he is no longer able to physically punish his adult son due to his age. By the way, Gavino Ledda still didn't feel happy.

Ledda, who has now settled down in his home village as a wealthy man, has been declared a non-person by the village community. Shots have also been fired at his house. You don't notice this ongoing atavism when you drive through beautiful Sardinia today.
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Manfred Füll
5.0 out of 5 stars Preparation for a tour of SardiniaReviewed in Germany on April 18, 2023
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We are going on a tour of Sardinia with a tour group. To get us in the mood, the tour guide recommended this book to us, among other things. It was only available antiquarian. - I'm now on page 120 (of about 300) and already have an impression of life on the island about 50 years ago.
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MarcoPolo
5.0 out of 5 stars Reckoning with late feudalism in SardinianReviewed in Germany on September 4, 2013
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What Franz Innerhofer's "Beautiful Days" is for us Austrians is probably Gavino Ledda's "Padre Padrone" for parts of Sardinian society.

Both books were published in the mid-1970s. They represent an unreserved reckoning with rural late feudalism, which exploited people - especially children - as labor. At the expense of their physical and mental health, at the expense of their future. The backdrops may vary: here the drudgery on the steep alpine meadows, there the social atrophy in the semi-wilderness of the pasture landscapes. The backgrounds are very similar: relics of the patronal peasantry after the war, which doggedly and in vain defended itself against the demands of modernity under the dictates of their fathers with an ever tougher approach.
Told uncomplainingly and therefore all the more touching, Ledda unfolds a panoptimum full of captivating insights into an agricultural culture that has now almost disappeared: that of the shepherds. Imbued with a mystical closeness to nature and yet not nearly as innocently cheerful as the nostalgic sentiment of those born afterward has portrayed them.

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Master father: the education of a shepherd

byGavino Ledda

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224 total ratings, 25 with reviews

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From other countries

Beppe

5.0 out of 5 stars Nice read

Reviewed in Italy on February 10, 2024

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A particular book, a story to read carefully, perhaps not for everyone but certainly a good read.

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Delza

4.0 out of 5 stars very interesting !

Reviewed in France on August 15, 2014

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This book is well written. It is easy to read. We follow the evolution of a little Sardinian boy in his family. We are surprised by the hardness and roughness of the characters' characters, in particular his parents. The book would seem to be a true testimony...but the ending is more reminiscent of a novel. Nevertheless, it turns out that this reading makes you think: we find well described the attitudes of the "heads of families" of the 1950s, who we could have encountered at that time both in Italy and in France in a rural environment. book raises many questions about education, the way of teaching, of learning, the way of developing intellectual faculties in a child and the part of love that must be offered to him. The way an adult manages his feelings, in a working life is still relevant as well as determining the purpose of his life.. . It's a book worth reading.

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Alberto Ena

4.0 out of 5 stars SLIDING

Reviewed in Italy on November 25, 2019

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Nice book, read quickly...

A cross-section of Sardinia seen from the point of view of a boy, and therefore a partial point of view...

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Brother Thousandfly

5.0 out of 5 stars Dramatic and beautiful.

Reviewed in Italy on April 4, 2020

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5 stars more than deserved. The true and cruel story of a 6-year-old boy taken away from school to end up in the countryside looking after livestock and learning the very hard job of being a farmer. Then the escape, the acquisition of a new self-awareness through study and the return and the almost fatal clash with the system of rules that does not allow exceptions to life understood as a bestial attempt at social advancement through work. A plain, dry narrative, without frills, dramatic in its lucid ruthlessness. The image of how many of our ancestors received the same education comes naturally and spontaneously and while reading our thoughts fly, grateful and moved, to them.

4 people found this helpful

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Joseph

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful book

Reviewed in Italy on February 24, 2023

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Family abuse and redemption. A classic

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Marco

3.0 out of 5 stars book - Master father

Reviewed in Italy on February 8, 2019

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I was not satisfied with the purchase because I thought I would receive a normal size book, but instead I received a paperback format.

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Symphony of books

5.0 out of 5 stars Advised

Reviewed in Italy on June 28, 2019

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Paid just under 3 euros in the outlet. Low-cost economical edition. Content-wise, a very good read that has nothing to envy of more famous Italian anthropological essays. It is normal to note the biographical factor of the author which can unilaterally overbalance some positions, but many considerations and judgments regarding a common phenomenon up until the beginning of the 90s are not affected, so that the work, decades later, maintains its rigor and its importance and, in these, Ledda's analyses. Advised

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alessio 1971

4.0 out of 5 stars great book, good edition

Reviewed in Italy on September 7, 2014

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The value of the book is known. the kindle edition is well edited, without transcription errors. Unfortunately very few notes and no comments or historical introductions (unfortunately constant in ebooks). recommended purchase.

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Silviaruberti

5.0 out of 5 stars what a story!!!

Reviewed in Italy on August 10, 2015

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I'm in Sardinia on holiday and what better occasion to read a book by a Sardinian author? But it is not the Sardinia of the sea and umbrellas, but that of harsh sheep farming up the mountains in the hinterland. Set in the 1950s, it is the true story of Gavino who was trained as a shepherd at the age of six, it is the story of his loneliness and the beatings by his father, but it is also the story of his cultural redemption. Handsome.

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Stefania

5.0 out of 5 stars Thanks Gavino, you are an example

Reviewed in Italy on June 27, 2018

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You are there, with that child, in the silence of the reeds in the wind of a hard and stubborn land, in his solitude and in his life as a shepherd and you follow him in his growth and his redemption. Gavino Ledda is still there, in his Sardinian house, to testify to us that all this really happened. An extraordinary work. A great testimony

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samAnE

711 reviews

94 followers

October 6, 2021

It was a good book. One of those books that are rarely seen. Gavino Leda is taken out of school by her father to help her with shepherding and housework. She, who was fascinated by learning, was forced to leave school and started learning at the age of twenty. His father considers himself to be his owner and uses him as much as he can. Gavino has a good relationship with nature and saves himself from the trap of ignorance with endless and tireless effort, and this makes his creative mind create this work in the cruel patriarchal society.

Ab Baba Arbab is not only the report of the victory of a long and gigantic struggle, but also the story of this day-to-day and year-to-year struggle, a struggle that takes place on two levels: personal - internal and social - historical.

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Malacorda

531 reviews

300 followers

April 13, 2020

True story of the author, from the day his father took him from elementary school, at 5 years old, to force him to be a shepherd, until the day when, at 24 years old, he moved to Salerno to start his high school diploma classic. Everyone who spoke to me about this book, and also the reviewers around here, tend to focus particularly on the violence and injustices, both physical and psychological, that this father uses on his son, to the point of making their relationship something like master -servant and not, precisely, father-son. In my opinion, however, the remarkable aspect of this story lies not so much in this situation, but in being able to observe the way in which the young Gavino got out of it. It is also important to observe how quickly a boy or a man becomes a beast if education and socialization are taken away from him. Abraham, in effect, only practiced what his father had done with himself, and his grandfather with his father, and so on endlessly going back through the generations. Therefore the father's cruelty is a secondary fact, it is a legacy of the past, it is part of other millennia, he is only the last representative of an ancient world, which, incredible to say, disappeared only a few years ago - and the way in which Gavino managed to enter the twentieth century is an action that takes on an even more heroic value.

More generally, the value of this reading lies in the strength of his testimony, it seems completely superfluous to me to illustrate its educational value; however, the quality of the writing is no exception, clean and measured, which starts with the slow rhythm of childhood, when time never seems to pass, and then gradually picks up the pace: the transformation/maturation of the author is well expressed with changes in tones, vocabulary and contents of dialogues and reflections.

Also significant are the observations on the bourgeoisie which is not so much, or in any case not only, a condition of those who have enriched themselves and hold some form of power over their subordinates, but rather a mental condition in which the shepherds themselves find themselves, despite their misery , in exercising the right of ownership over their plot of land and their few possessions as an exasperated contrast between "mine" and "yours" (and it occurs to me that this thing still exists in the mountains today, it is really more deep-rooted than you think).

Another notable passage is when we talk about the emigrants, about their relationship of love and hate with their land, and this applies to all of Italy at the time, certainly not only to Sardinia, and it should also be reread in an updated way.

And again, another passage that I want to underline is the revelation that music represents for the young Gavino when he learns to play the accordion: a simple thing like music, still considered by most to be a superfluous thing, is what brought him out from his condition: “It's me who's playing! It doesn't seem real to me. But I have to believe it. I play too. With rough, animalistic, but inflexible will, my fingers, callused and crooked by the hoe, for the first time had the opportunity to express, to the centuries-old oaks, the sensitivity of generations and generations never educated in music. And through my fingers the caveman, still intact inside me, but sensitive in all his humanity, began to soften with the music: to delve within himself and discover that beyond his fields the world did not end with the horizon and that the mine of its resources overflowed the sky that it had known until then.”

The clash between the ancient ancestral/pastoral/peasant world and the contemporary is something truly complex, we could talk about it for hours and hours... when one thinks of concrete, of the destruction of the territory and of the way in which modern man insults and destroys animals and all of nature, then one comes to regret antiquity; but when you read testimonies like this, when you talk about beastly fatigue, fleas and illiteracy, then I also think that not everything is wrong in the modern world... for those who want to delve deeper into the topic and perhaps even stay in a Sardinian setting, I suggest you read Assandira by Angioni.

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Outis

328 reviews

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October 28, 2020

Due to the themes covered, it reminded me of a book that was very successful a year or two ago, namely The Education of Tara Westover . Both tell of paths of emancipation from an oppressive and violent environment thanks to a late education. Yet, while Westover often gave me the impression of exaggerating events for sensationalist purposes, with Gavino Ledda's memoir I never had this impression.

The descriptions of nature are very beautiful and heartfelt; violent episodes are described without morbidity.

1950-1999

Italy

nonfiction-memoir

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Cyrano

164 reviews

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April 13, 2020

When a journalist from “La Nuova Sardegna” asked Abramo Ledda to accompany him to Baddevrustana, he, with his authoritarian yet almost century-old manner, replied: “I'm not going there. That, for my family, was a cursed place."

Abraham, in almost a century of life, has experienced the change of Sardinia (but also of all of Italy) from how it had been for centuries with its traditions, its rites, its customs; where a father was a master, "boss" in a strongly patriarchal society, founded on its main nucleus: the family, as we see it today.

Gavino, the first of six children, was withdrawn from school at the age of five after just over a month, because his father wanted him in the fold in Baddevrustana, because school was not useful, it was even "harmful" as Abramo would say years later (" You are following a wrong path from which I have tried several times to divert you. Yours is a fixation, who are you to expect to graduate? "), almost as if the desire for acculturation and social ascension was a dishonor.

The child he thus found himself facing situations much bigger than himself, completely alone (" I often made soliloquies. And by dint of being alone and speaking with my inner self or with nature through silence, words were losing their importance for me ") and he couldn't make a mistake in carrying out the "master's" orders, otherwise they were blows, or rather real beatings ( "He attacked me screaming like a fury and hit me with blows without looking where they ended up, as was done with beasts ") and he, Gavino, had been " lucky [...] Many of my peers died like winter lambs born in the freezing night that their fathers were unable to feed in time as they emerged from their mother's womb ".

But Abraham was the master and it didn't matter if Gavino was a child, according to him at seven years old " I should have been a complete shepherd " helping to herd the livestock and cultivate the land, because in his house you couldn't stay " a cozzones a fogu ” (“idle”).

Throughout his childhood and adolescence, Gavino lived in the sheepfold, with only a few trips to Siligo to deliver or collect goods and products, losing contact with other people (with the exception of some shepherds), speaking only in whistles or in verses with animals, but also with his father (“ I wasn't able to talk to anyone. I was ashamed and in awe of the presence of others. I only knew the sheep. ”).

Around the age of twenty the desire for redemption began. Perhaps he was no longer able to continue that type of life of toil and humiliation ("[…] even in Sardinia there was a road open to every shepherd, a road that could be taken without licking the Dons. It was banditry. A treacherous road where you can unleash all that zeal that itches under your muscles [...] I continued to be a civil bandit, like all shepherds. ”) and followed the most difficult, but also the most honest, path. At first it was music with the lessons of Thiu Gellòn stolen from the rare trips to Siligo, then the failed attempt to emigrate to Holland and finally the voluntary enlistment in the army non-commissioned officer course.

Here, despite having arrived practically illiterate and almost without knowing Italian, also thanks to the help of people who took his situation to heart such as the poet Franco Manescalchi, he began his personal climb to education, which in reality was perhaps a social climb and redemption from a life of deprivation.

Gavino had made it, he was no longer that beaten, humiliated and scared child of his first years in Baddevrustana. In the meantime, Sardinia had changed, it was transforming into something different (and I don't know if better).

“ What remained was an already mutilated world. Only the old, the children and the physical and psychological waste that resulted from the selections of the emigrations and the police, wandered around in those private camps of healthy young people. ”

And perhaps Abraham had never understood or accepted all this.

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payam Mohammadi

130 reviews

10 followers

February 18, 2023

From page 86 to 89, about four to eight pages have been deleted. Naturally, I did not check it completely, but if you check the whole book, it is likely that the omissions will be more than this. I really don't know why publishers are willing to publish their books at any price?! Those pages that I mentioned above that were deleted can actually be said to be one of the masterpieces of literary humor in contemporary Italy. Now, in those parts, Mr. Gavino Leda and his friends had intercourse with donkeys, sheep, and chickens. But in the story "Donkey and Maid" by Masnavi Manavi, the donkey did not meet with the maid, but the publishers published it; Did it cause the nation to have sex with a donkey following this story?

I don't know if these deleted parts were deleted with the knowledge of the late Sahabi, or if the publishing house deleted them for good service, but in any case, they should not have come under the burden of this censorship and published the book.

Is it really worth 500 copies, which took several years to be sold, to smear this book like this?

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About the book itself, Babad said it was an immensely impressive book; To the extent that tears are running to my eyes unintentionally in some places. Wherever people are on this earth, they suffer a lot of difficulties and hardships, which cannot be avoided.

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Mimma Randazzo

46 reviews

3 followers

December 22, 2021

"It's mine: I need it in the country."

Gavino takes us into his past, into his land, showing us how sad the reality of a child who has everything taken away from him can be; childhood, education, friends and carefreeness. Gavino, son of a master father, used and exploited as a means of subsistence for the family. With him I discovered many things that I didn't know existed, I experienced poverty, misery, fear and terror with him. And then I rejoiced for him in his strength and his rebirth. A book that arouses many emotions and is difficult to forget. An autobiography of a hard life that he was able to redeem with courage.

"I swear to you that if I manage to set foot outside, I will never return to this cursed place. It is clear that when the Creator created the world he asked the devil for help and told him to create Sardinia."

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Monica

133 reviews

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May 9, 2014

Gavino Ledda, until the age of eighteen, was practically illiterate. Forced from an early age to work as a shepherd by a despotic and sometimes very violent father, who held every member of the large family under his iron fist. Yet this poor illiterate shepherd has an iron will. During his military service, he obtained an elementary and middle school diploma, successfully passed a course that he would absolutely not have been able to pass due to lack of scholastic foundations, graduated in glottology and also became a member of the Crusca academy. This book is the chronicle of this extraordinary person, this incredible intellectual.

I believe that everyone, at least once in their life, should read Ledda. Because this book releases hope from every pore. It teaches us that it is never too late, even if it seems like there is no hope. Gavino Ledda teaches that anyone can do it, you just need willpower.

A great book, which moved me to tears and gave me hope to chase my dreams. I can only be grateful to this great little Sardinian intellectual.

biographical

Italian literature

simply-the-best

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Arash Khosravi

1 review

1 follower

August 23, 2020

How effective is geographic determinism in determining a person's life path?

How can a person resist the fate that has been determined for him and move against the current in the direction of determining his own destiny?

The answer to these questions can be found in the life of Gavino Leda.

Gavino Leda was born in 1938 on the island of Sardinia.

According to the patriarchal custom, his father considered his ruler as his master and thus he forced Gavino to drop out of school at the age of 6 to help him in shepherding.

During the long years of solitude in the desert, Gavino discovered feelings and subtleties that his father and other shepherds considered worthless, because life for the people of Siligo village only meant trying to survive

. has described it well: "The life of an unlucky shrub whose seed has been placed in an inappropriate place on top of a wall or on the edge of a precipice by the capricious hand of the wind".

But Gavino, who was illiterate until the age of 20, gradually began to learn music and literature, and thus found an escape route from the life that his father had set for him, he came out from under the rule of the "master" and turned into a He became one of the great writers of Italian literature.

The book Ab Baba Arbab is the story of this long struggle and this great victory from his own words. A struggle on the one hand with himself, who has been used to fearing his father and obeying him unquestioningly for years, and on the other hand, with the ruling relations of the society, which condemns any effort that is not in the direction of sheepish obedience to the master.

In addition to narrating his life story, the author tries to dissect the exploited Sardinian society in the middle of the 20th century. A society based on the obedience of the servant to the master and the son to the father.

One of the strengths of the book is its simple and catchy prose, which the late Mehdi Sahabi translated into Farsi well.

In 1977, Taviani brothers directed a film adaptation of the book with the same name, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes.

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Atticus06

101 reviews

58 followers

January 30, 2013

Gavino Ledda and Frank McCourt

The similar destinies of two people who, following different paths, have achieved a common goal: social and cultural redemption.

Both suffered poverty, they had a father who, although in a different way, wrote part of their history, preparing them for a hopeless future, and both had the final push to escape a destiny already written thanks to military service, escape route to start a new life.

In the end, after many sacrifices and willpower they reached a position that no one thought possible. Stories of our time.

Dramatic but with ironic moments linked to pastoral life and some of the little shepherds' boasts regarding sexual precocity.

Ledda writes in a simple but elegant way and involves with a narrative pace that never slows down.

Highly recommended.

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Amazon.com: Padre Padrone, My Father, My Master: Gavino Ledda, George Salmanazar: Books

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