A Place To Live: And Other Selected Essays of Natalia Ginzburg

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I told the children about our city. They were very small when we left, and had no memories of it. I told them how the houses had many floors and there were lots of streets and buildings and beautiful stores. “But here we have Girò’s,” the children said. Natalia Ginzburg escribe para rebatir. En este conjunto de ensayos periodísticos la escritora a través de la opinión intenta buscar un acuerdo entre temas para exponer con la mayor inteligencia que posee una conclusión. Así, nos encontramos con una primera parte llena de reseñas a novelistas, comentarios a cineastas y su parecer sobre personalidades italianas. Reading Natalia Ginzburg” introduces the general reader to Ginzburg’s life and writing; it explores the texts, voices, bodies, and spaces that define her style and subject matter; and highlights the work of her translators. It constructs an accessible scaffolding with multiple points of view and multiple points of entry. In this collective winter of our exile, I admit to you that rereading this essay has become a furtive searching for some way to avoid living through what has already happened, is happening, will happen. Some way to circumvent the tragedy she details here, the loss of her love yes, but also the tragedy of an understanding that comes too late and so is useless.

Un libro que es sin duda una manera acertada para acercarse a la autora y conocerla, antes de querer devorarla sin control. Y es que Natalia tiene una aptitud de atraparte entre verdades filosóficas que se podrían acercar a una ficción filosófica pero que tienen su base en lo real, en meras reflexiones que le surgen en la cabeza y las plasma.

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On Female Genius: A Conversation with Italian Writer and Ginzburg Biographer Sandra Petrignani,” translated from Italian by Stiliana Milkova and Serena Todesco 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 Opponents of the Fascist regime, she and her husband secretly went to Rome and edited an anti-Fascist newspaper, until Leone Ginzburg was arrested. He died in incarceration in 1944 after suffering severe torture. [5]

Ginzburg’s death in 1991 was the occasion for an outpouring of critical praise and affectionate personal reminiscence in the Italian press. In her native country she has long been recognized as one of its greatest twentieth-century writers, and the most eloquent, incisive, and provocative chronicler of the war years and the postwar ambience (notably in All Our Yesterdays and Voices in the Evening). Mostly what she provoked was love and allegiance, but there was occasional exasperation at the outspoken, intransigent quality of her thought and moral judgments (precisely what I find most endearing). The critic Enzo Siciliano, while expressing awe for Ginzburg’s “grasping things without any intellectual filters,” also notes that this “very peremptory and direct way of presenting her ideas” could alienate readers accustomed to a more temperate mode of argument. Beginning in 1950, when Ginzburg married again and moved to Rome, she entered the most prolific period of her literary career. During the next 20 years, she published most of the works for which she is best known. She and Baldini were deeply involved in the cultural life of the city.

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. History’s Inexorable Demands”: An Excerpt from Sandra Petrignani’s La corsara, translated from Italian by Minna Zallman Proctor

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.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. Her life was difficult, but she sublimated hardship into superb writing. She grew up in Turin, the fifth child of the renowned Jewish professor Giuseppe Levi and his Catholic wife Lidia Tanzi. Natalia lived through the horrors of fascist Italy and the anti-racial laws. In 1940 she accompanied her husband, the anti-fascist political activist and the co-founder of Einaudi Leone Ginzburg on his internal exile. And in 1944, shortly after she followed him to Rome with their three children, Leone was tortured and murdered in a Roman prison. They had been married for six years. Her simplicity is an achievement, hard-won and remarkable, and the more welcome in a literary world where the cloak of omniscience is all too readily donned.”—William Weaver, The New York Times

This 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.There is no one quite like Natalia Ginzburg for telling it like it is. Her unique, immediately recognizable voice is at once clear and shaded, artless and sly, able to speak of the deepest sorrows and smallest pleasures of everyday life. For all those like myself who love Natalia Ginzburg’s prose, this generous selection assembled from her essay collections will be irresistible, a must to own, cherish, and re-read.”—Phillip Lopate 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…. 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) * The lore of her large, loving, and discordant family provides rich material for Ginzburg’s engrossing autobiographical novel.”— Publishers Weekly