Maria Spissu Nilson

The Salt Man Maria Spissu Nilson

The adventures and mishaps of a man who makes his living selling salt in Sardinia's villages. Still a child, a prostitute mother sells him to the owner of salt pans on the coast. He becomes the man's plaything and slave. He grows into a solitary man whose friends are his horse and a fortune teller who has initiated him into manhood and perceives his future. It is the story of a young couple looking forward to a peaceful life and children, but destiny has other plans for them and for a strange woman the wife befriends. Together, they engage in a struggle leading to death and an unwanted child. A story of impossible passions. Their lives unfold against the background of a little-known Sardinia, where time is told by the unhurried passing of the seasons and not the frenetic spinning of the hands of a clock, with men and women, the salt of the earth, coping with events beyond their control and comprehension, in an epoch of the past that only recently has become the present. Theirs is a time of war and the "collateral damage" of women and children deprived of the husbands and fathers. Men who return maimed in body and spirit, bringing with them the tainted seeds of future generations.