“It rained so much in Sardinia this winter that the land, which is usually dry and windy, turned green and lush as in Ireland,” said Antonio Marras over a Zoom call from his Circolo Marras headquarters in Milan. The bizarre weather triggered his raconteur talent, so for pre-fall he came up with an idiosyncratic literary plot. It entailed a moody mixture of Thomas Hardy, Lewis Carroll and Virginia Wolf, all entangled in a surreal bookish narration, with a sort of Sardinian version of Bloomsbury thrown in for good measure.
The story goes that there was this woman called Jana, who lived in a remote house deep in a wild wood by the sea. Jana is a common first name in Sardinia; Janas were also magical creatures imagined by the local artist Maria Lai (her work being a frequent source of inspiration for Marras): sort of island fairies, laborious and mysterious but also quite despondent and unnerving. Marras’ Jana seemed to be more on the laborious side. Crafty and resourceful, her ho