All Our Yesterdays

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This is not the easiest book to read, and yet it is one of the most beautiful storytelling I've encountered in a while. Siempre que leo algo relacionado con la guerra me resulta incomprensible, y a la vez, quiero leer más. A particular sympathy grows up between us and the characters we invent—that our debilitated imagination is still just able to invent—a sympathy that is tender and almost maternal, warm and damp with tears, intimately physical and stifling. Set in a smaller town in Italy before and during the Second World War, Natalia Ginzburg’s All Our Yesterdays is simply wonderful; a big-hearted, bustling novel of family, friendships, politics, and war pitted against a backdrop of immense turbulence, and narrated in a style that captures Ginzburg’s customary dry wit.

Another singular feature of the novel is Ginzburg’s wry humour and deadpan wit as reflected in her striking prose style. The war ended a year later, when Ginzburg was still in her 20s, a widowed mother of three small children. When Germany invades Poland in 1939 and Britain and France declare war, our Italians are still convinced their country won’t enter the war on either side. Interestingly, it has resonances for me with the book I’m just finished, Victor Serge’s “Last Times”. Set against the backdrop of Italy between 1939 to 1944 - the months of anxiety before the country entered the war through to the tension following the Allied victory - "All Our Yesterdays" follows the lives of two families during the period of great turbulence.Thus, in a move that greatly bewilders Anna’s family, Cenzo Rena marries Anna and the couple moves to his house in the village of San Costanza which becomes the central focus of Part Two of the book. In Part One, Ginzburg focuses her gaze on an ensemble cast – two families living in a smaller town in Northern Italy.

In 1944, Leone was imprisoned, tortured and killed by the incumbent regime for his covert work on an anti-fascist newspaper. At times the story is Jerry Springer-like as when one daughter marries the crazy older man, a family friend who lives in the richer house, who was having an affair with her mother. Anos čia radau mano skoniui per mažai, buvo tarsi bandoma papasakoti apie visus veikėjus, bet nė į vieną nepasigilinama labiau, todėl kai kur pasirodė, kad autorė plaukia paviršiumi, nors medžiagos pasikapstyti giliau čia buvo apstu. At the heart of the novel is a concern with experiences that both deepen and deaden existence: adultery and air raids, neighbourhood quarrels and bombings. Porque na Polónia morria gente, todos os dias morria gente de um lado e do outro, enquanto ele e Emanuele estavam sentados a falar no terraço e a senhora Maria procurava açúcar pela cidade.Pero acabó conquistandome, quedé enamorada de Cenzo Rena, generoso y exagerado y de Anna, que soñaba con la revolución, de giuma, ipolito, de todos, así que, aunque el tono no haya cambiado, me encantó. Even toddlers in her novel are angry or manipulative or silent and so are all the adults flawed – in personality and in appearance. In times of crisis, she learns – and we learn along with her – that there can be no ethics without politics.

The great emotional power of this novel springs from the depth and truth of each one of its characters.It’s a brilliant novel, full of warmth, intelligence and humanity, punctuated by wry observations on the tangled business of life. German soldiers occupied Italian towns and conscripted Italian men to work in German factories (where many of them died due to Allied bombing of the factories). But I guess I’ve homed in on Anna because she features quite heavily in part two where we follow her move to the South and her marriage to Cenzo Rena.