A Place to Live: And Other Selected Essays

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Serena Cruz o la vera giustizia (1990). Serena Cruz, or The Meaning of True Justice, transl. Lynn Sharon Schwartz (2002) Part II, “A Poetics of the Real: Natalia Ginzburg’s Voices, Bodies, and Spaces,” explores in more depth Ginzburg’s unique style. Katrin Wehling-Giorgi discusses the forging of Ginzburg’s female voice out of real and existential exile, both as a Jew and as a woman operating in what was still a deeply patriarchal culture. Serena Todesco listens attentively to Natalia’s recorded voice whose aural presence lends a key to reading her works, offering an insight into her inner world and poetics, and constituting a means of resistance. Enrica Maria Ferrara’s contribution sheds light on Ginzburg’s representation of queer identity in the novella Valentino and argues for the text’s intersectional feminism avant la lettre. Italo Calvino’s essay “Natalia Ginzburg or the Possibilities of the Bourgeois Novel,” appearing in English for the first time, articulates crucial components of Ginzburg’s singular style. In the closing essay Roberto Carretta maps and then meditates on the topography underpinning Ginzburg’s gaze—Turin’s real and metaphysical cityscape. Ginzburg was a masterful writer, a witty, elegant prose stylist, and a fiercely intelligent thinker….This 1963 novel, newly translated by novelist McPhee, is a genre-defying work. It reads like a memoir, but it doesn’t adhere to the conventions of either fiction or nonfiction…. Ginzburg does not spare herself in rebuilding this season gone for her reader. She is unflinching and clear-eyed in her portrayal of herself; the Natalia in the essay, experiences joy and contentment, but also boredom, anger, and simmering resentment. She is frank in sharing how the exile sat heavy on her. She admits freely that no matter the sparkling wonder of the weft, the warp was a numbing mundane, a wearing domesticity. “We would light our green stove with the long pipe running across the ceiling; we used to gather in the rom with the stove—we cooked and ate there, my husband wrote at the big oval table and the children scattered their toys on the floor. A picture of an eagle was painted on the ceiling, and I would stare at the eagle, thinking that that was exile. Exile was the eagle, it was the humming green stove, it was the vast silent countryside and the motionless snow” (36). I WAS 24 years old when I met Natalia Ginzburg in Rome. I had just come from three weeks of intensive study of Italian at the Universita per Stranieri di Perugia (University for Foreigners in Perugia), and before that had managed to pass an Italian reading comprehension test for a graduate program that I never completed. With the misplaced confidence of the young, I assumed I’d be able to conduct an adequate conversation with her. During the Italian course at Perugia, the teacher had introduced us to Ginzburg’s early essays collected in Le piccole virtù ( The Little Virtues) and I was immediately enamored of them. Every lucid, plangent sentence enchanted my ears and twisted my heart. The essay “Broken Shoes” considered the condition of her shoes as she walked through Rome after the fascists murdered her husband, preceded by a spell of political exile with their children in a village in the Abruzzi region. The essays about their life in that town sketched the mutually generous friendships that developed between her family and the local people.

Although Natalia Ginzburg was able to live relatively free of harassment during World War II, her husband Leone was sent into internal exile because of his anti-Fascist activities, assigned from 1941–1943 to a village in Abruzzo. She and their children lived most of the time with him. [5] If what Ginzburg offers in her essays is the examined life, then the acuity of her writing is in the process of examination. It has been a privilege to witness and partake of that process. On Female Genius: A Conversation with Italian Writer and Ginzburg Biographer Sandra Petrignani,” translated from Italian by Stiliana Milkova and Serena TodescoNearly all had missing teeth: the women down there lose their teeth at thirty, from hard work and poor nutrition as well as from the strains of childbirth and nursing babies that come one after the other relentlessly. (36)

The atmosphere of the book is so clear and immediate that reading it is like being there or seeing a film.”— The Christian Science Monitor In each novella the central figure is middle-aged — Carmine in Family is just over 40, Ilaria in Borghesia somewhat older. Each story offers a large cast of characters: neighbors, a busybody, in-laws, a few drifters who come and go, several described with recurring tags like Homeric epithets; each novella contains a suicide. The protagonists are the poles around whom the motley supporting characters revolve, like the whirling horses in a merry-go-round. Each protagonist has lost a child years ago, and each is involved in an unhappy relationship: Carmine’s wife, Ninetta of the dark bangs and phony smile, is superficial and selfish; Ilaria’s sometime lover is a deeply depressed doctor who lives in another town, barely pays attention to her, and halfway through the narrative kills himself. Each one has a living child: Carmine’s son Dodo is a chubby, fearful, coddled five-year-old, and Ilaria’s daughter of 18 is recently married but will shortly find a new man worse than the first. Though the trauma and grief of Leone Ginzburg’s death colored her life and work forever, Ginzburg remained unremittingly dedicated to her craft and to speaking out against injustice and equivocation. Her novels and plays focus on large moral issues as played out ruefully, often with tragicomic results, in the lives of individual characters. But the essays are where she speaks in her most candid voice. It is the intimate yet elusive tone of that voice, along with the challenge of trying to hear it in English, that has long intrigued me. Cynthia Zarin (2020). Introduction. Valentino and Sagittarius. By Ginzburg, Natalia. New York: New York Review Books. pp.vii–xi. ISBN 9781681374741.

The daily ups and downs of our life, the daily ups and downs we witness in others’ lives, all that we read and see and think and discuss feeds its hunger, and it grows within us. It is a craft that thrives on terrible things too; it feeds on the best and the worst in our life, our evil feelings and our good feelings course through its blood. It feeds on us, and it thrives. So for example, Schwartz’s “’How mean you are, Giro,’ the women said to him, and he answered ‘People who aren’t mean get eaten by dogs.’” (8) becomes Davis’s “’You’re so mean, Giró,’ the women said. And he’d retort, ‘If you’re good you get eaten alive.’” (39) Davis’s “…and winter begins.” (3) Becomes Schwartz’s “…and winter sets in.” (35) Or the epigraph from Virgil, “Deus nobis haec otia fecit.,” which Schwartz translates as “God has granted us this respite” becomes with Davis, “God has given us this moment of peace.” In one the word otia is peace and in the other respite. If both translations are read together however, the true expanse of the word can begin to be gauged. The reader is reminded all peace is finite, all peace is just a season. And the reader is also reminded that a moment of respite can become larger than itself, can open into memory, can become, in a sense, peace. In winter some old person would die of pneumonia, the bells of Santa Maria tolled the death knell, and Domenico Orecchia, the carpenter, built the casket. A woman went crazy and was taken to the asylum at Collemaggio and the whole town talked about it for quite a while. She was young and clean, the cleanest woman in the village: they said it must have been because of her great cleanliness. (37) * Ginzburg’s sentences are compact and satisfying in their directness, yet they are also redolent with emotional fat (just the thing to ingest when experiencing a winter of your own). Behind the exactness of her almost journalistic observations, the strange and resonant details she includes are surreal, dreamlike. A Place to Live: this is a funny chapter; in World War II Italy Natalia and her husband look for an apartment they can both agree on to buy. It takes months to find one.

Like all of her work, these two novellas follow “the long chain of human relations […] making its long and inevitable parabola,” as she writes in her superb 1953 essay, “Human Relations.” They are suffused with the rigorous wisdom Ginzburg earned through calamity and her determination to persist nonetheless in her work. It is very difficult and demanding work, she writes in “My Craft,” and hungry for material. Despite the disingenuously modest stance of several of the essays (“I don’t know anything about politics,” for example, as the opening of the astute “An Invisible Government”), hers was a life spent at the center of Italian culture; she even served for one term in Parliament. She enjoyed a close circle of literary friends whose work she did not hesitate to criticize sternly when she saw fit—Alberto Moravia, for one, or Giulio Einaudi, as evidenced in “No Fairies, No Wizards.” Now, when the work I began over thirty years ago is done, that personal encounter no longer matters to me. With literature, the past consumes the personal and circumstantial and leaves the essential, which is the work, the words. In the case of Ginzburg, their particular power is in delineating how intricate are our responses to ordinary and extraordinary events, how fraught with dread and absurdity and effort is that “long and inevitable parabola…we have to travel to feel, at last, a bit of compassion.” Every inch of that parabola is traced with rigorous, ardent clarity. Each Ginzburg sentence reminds us that everything we say and do matters too much for carelessness and evasion. This makes daily life more difficult, yes, but more charged and exhilarating too. Natalia Ginzburg witnessed the rise of Fascism in her native Italy, the second world war, the death of her husband in prison. The essays collected in this book are haunted by the past, by her confrontation with evil and abject misery, which she survived and others had not. El breve ensayo que le da título al libro, Vida imaginaria, es sublime. Si fuera simplemente esas páginas que contiene el ensayo la totalidad del libro le daría un diez. Es capaz de volver a su niñez, caminar entre sus recuerdos y exponernos cómo cambiamos y porqué lo hacemos. Asienta bases y conceptos filosóficos y además aúna una capacidad intelectual al reírse de sí misma. Maravilloso, lo único que pudo decir.The pleasure of her contradictions seduced me, as well as the rigor of her thinking: a stubborn, unsparing gaze informed by vast compassion; humor that flashed forth brilliantly and unexpectedly—in a writer whose favorite subjects were contemporary anomie, moral failure, and war and its grievous aftermath; above all, the elaborations that turned up like sinuous detours, after the trusting traveler has been expecting a straight, easy road. At some point on this mesmerizing journey it is apparent that we’ve been led into darker and denser territory than we bargained for. Ginzburg forces us to examine the smallest and largest aspects of our lives with a daunting yet energizing scrutiny. By the end of each essay layered with subversive thought and feeling, we have to marvel at how she has managed to bring us so far, and so fast.

The end of winter awakened a vague restlessness in us. Maybe someone would come to visit, maybe something would finally happen. Surely our exile, too, must have an end. The roads cutting us off from the world seemed shorter, the mail came more often. All our chilblains slowly healed. Clear, honest, quietly strong … Ginzburg compels us to examine the smallest and largest aspects of our lives in a way that is inspiring and exhilarating … Carefully chosen and beautifully translated by the American writer Lynne Sharon Schwartz.” –Sian Williams, Times Literary Supplement In 1938, she married Leone Ginzburg, and they had three children together, Carlo, Andrea, and Alessandra. [4] Their son Carlo Ginzburg became a historian. The Light of Turin: Natalia Ginzburg’s Cityscape” by Roberto Carretta, translated from Italian by Stiliana MilkovaThis wonderful book is a selection of essays from four previously published books of Natalia Ginsburg (1916-1991), translated from the Italian by Lynn Sharon Schwartz. One of Italy’s finest postwar writers. . . . If Elena Ferrante is a master of the sprawling, unputdownable epic, Ginzburg is a miniaturist. Her themes are buried in gestures, fragments, absences—not in what is said, but in what is not said. . . . Her masterpiece—the hyperbole is warranted—is Family Lexicon.”—Negar Azimi, Bookforum So why doesn’t this story have the emotional richness of Family? Unlike Carmine, a tangled, tormented character, Ilaria’s emotional life is hollow: that is the essence of her tale, the reason why a friend suggests she get a cat. But her hollowness can’t carry the weight of the narrative as Carmine’s complexity does. The surrounding characters, while never dull, do not work their way into the heart. Compared to Family, Borghesia seems something Ginzburg might have tossed off as a companion piece. Even the humor is broader and lighter than in Family. Sometimes I catch myself humming the words of this song, and then the whole village rises up before me, bringing the special flavor of its seasons, the icy gusts of wind, the sound of the bells.