Sea and Sardinia

D.H. Lawrence needed to leave Sicily. Something in its Byzantine churches and exhausted civilizations had worn thin on him. In January 1921, he and his wife Frieda boarded a steamer bound for Sardinia, an island they barely knew, drawn by the promise of something wilder, less contaminated by the modern world's weariness. What follows is neither a tourist's diary nor a simple escape narrative. Lawrence transfigures landscape into a kind of spiritual seismograph, recording the vibrations of his own restless consciousness against the ancient, almost pre-human rhythms of the island interior. He finds shepherds and stone villages, a fierce autonomy, a people who seem to belong to different laws than the mechanized Europe they're hurtling toward. But Sea and Sardinia is also something else: a sharp, dark-tinged inquiry into the political and spiritual bankruptcy of the post-war world, a book that quietly registers the early stirrings of fascism and communism while searching for some fresher source of life. Lawrence was never content with mere travel writing, and this book, with its censored passages now restored, reveals exactly what he called it: 'a marvel of veracity.' For readers who want their journeys to cut deeper than geography, this remains a strange and stimulant book.