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

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The Son of Man: the seriousness of having "grown up" with war; earlier generations still think to older, better times; but those who have grown up with war cannot forget and always worry it can happen again. (1946) The three parts of “Reading Natalia Ginzburg” that I have outlined here are in fact interconnected, each illuminating aspects of the other two, presenting a view at once panoramic and up-close. Nearly 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) This special issue “Reading Natalia Ginzburg” (February 2021) responds to the renewed interest in her writing in the Anglophone world and posits that Ginzburg’s texts capture many of our own struggles today. As Katrin Wehling-Giorgi comments in her contribution: On Female Genius: A Conversation with Italian Writer and Ginzburg Biographer Sandra Petrignani,” translated from Italian by Stiliana Milkova and Serena Todesco

Lynne Sharon Schwartzis the author of over 25 books, including the novels Disturbances in the Fieldand Leaving Brooklyn, and the poetry collections In Solitary(2002) and See You in the Dark(2012).Her translations from Italian include Smoke Over Birkenau(1998), by Liana Millu, and A Place to Live: Selected Essays of Natalia Ginzburg(2003). Her most recent book is the story collection, Truthtelling.

An activist, for a time in the 1930s she belonged to the Italian Communist Party. In 1983, she was elected to Parliament from Rome as an independent politician. Ginzburg was politically involved throughout her life as an activist and polemicist. Like many prominent anti-Fascists, for a time she belonged to the Italian Communist Party. She was elected to the Italian Parliament as an Independent in 1983. 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. 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 remarked in one of her essays that she would like to write a book called Vicende, “Event.” “Events” would be more appropriate, or “Vicissitudes.” She’s done precisely that in both these novellas — it’s one damn thing after another, a chronicle of interwoven lives. But Famiglia has the more sophisticated shape. Re-reading her works in the midst of this devastating pandemic, I can newly relate to the rawness that stands out amidst the everyday in her writings, to the acute presence of trauma in the face of personal and collective hardship, and to the material constraints of family commitments in the intellectual and practical life of women that she relates so compellingly. History’s Inexorable Demands”: An Excerpt from Sandra Petrignani’s La corsara, translated from Italian by Minna Zallman Proctor L'inserzione (1968). The Advertisement, transl. Henry Reed (1968) – performed at the Old Vic, London, directed by Sir Laurence Olivier and starring Joan Plowright, in 1968.

and other selected essays of

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. Natalia Ginzburg’s “Winter in the Abruzzi” is a short essay about a period in the author’s life that she spent with her family in political exile from Rome. I first read it in the early spring of 2020, as I was fitfully flitting from one book to another looking for any distraction from the incomprehensibility overtaking everything around us. It has accompanied me ever since. 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. 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.

Natalia Ginzburg comes to us with absolute clarity amid the veils of time and language.” –Rachel Cusk, author of the Outlinetrilogy The friend who had recommended Dr. B. […] said he was Jewish, German, and a Jungian. The fact that he was a Jungian […] to me was immaterial since I had confused notions about the difference between Jung and Freud. In fact one day I asked Dr. B. to explain this difference to me. He spun out an elaborate explanation and at some point I lost the thread and got distracted gazing at his brass ring, the little silver curls over his ears, and his wrinkled brow […] I felt like I was in school, where I used to ask for explanations and then get lost thinking of other things. 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.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. Anyone who is a parent will be familiar with the Greek chorus of elders who punctuate every moment with their admonitions to cherish it as it will be gone from you before you know it. (You almost feel their absence in this essay, however, do they not exist in Italy? Instead, the townspeople say things like “what sin did they commit?” when she takes the children outside for their daily walk, they teach them songs about being eaten alive.) There is a shared implicit understanding that surrounds the domestic, that one must enjoy it, because one must anticipate the future self regarding the present self as ignorantly living the best moments of their life, even though that moment might be emblemized by the time you spend staring at the ceiling.