A young Englishman arrives in Sardinia in the 1960s: a land of sun, sea, ancient civilizations, and a pride which sets the people apart from other Italians—although they share their towards sexuality. Unmarried men and women cannot meet without chaperones, and anyone with “continental” attitudes is considered immoral.
His main problem is to find a Sard girl but when he finally succeeds it is with one who lives in Rome and is no longer accepted at home. Only then she falls in love with an introspective lawyer friend instead.
Sardinian Silver (the name of a wine) evokes the mystery atmosphere of the island at that time, with all of the contradictions of a relatively backward society.
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Biography :
A. Colin Wright was born and raised in the county of Essex, England. After serving as a linguist in the British Royal Air Force, Wright attended Cambridge University where he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees. In 1964, he was appointed a professor of Russian at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He remained at Queen’s until his retirement in 1999 and still resides there today. Dr. Wright is married and has two grown sons. See also www.sardiniansilver.com and www.acolinwright.ca
Book Review :
ForeWord Clarion Review, 2009 After an absence of forty-two years, languages professor A. Colin Wright returned for a visit to Sardinia. His nostalgic novel, Sardinian Silver, he says in its afterword, “evokes a Sardinia that no longer exists but which had a quality of its own that is worth remembering.” It was a quality he also found in the no longer extant brand of Sardinian Silver wine that was “like a fleeting memory of something beautiful.” His efforts to recapture the quality and memories of Sardinia, the wine, and his friends from the 1960s have resulted in a novel of superior literary merit. Wright’s novel is a pastoral romance about a summer in the life of twenty-four-year-old Englishman Arthur Fraser, a tourist guide in Sardinia. It is skilfully and evocatively written, relying on the interactions between its characters as they travel and fall in and out of love. And when Arthur and his friend Gavino vie for the same girl, a kind of genteel jealousy arises, which suits the type of novel Wright has written. Otherwise, the novel relies upon Arthur and his several female acquaintances to add spice in some episodes and humour in others. Of particular note is Wright’s ability to elicit the morals and mores of 1960’s Sardinia. Wright’s characters spring to life, full blown. Angst-ridden Arthur unceasingly searches for love with all the wrong women until the right one arrives at the book’s conclusion. His girlfriends contrast the morality of the day and the place with their boldness and outspokenness. In the end, as Arthur reminisces years later with his wife about Sardinia and “all the people we knew there,” he concludes, “An odd bunch, weren’t they?” But odd or not, they are well worth knowing. M. Wayne Cunningham
