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

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Carmine and Ivana no longer remember exactly why they parted, nor is there any regret or wish to resume the affair. To write merely of a wrong choice and the subsequent remorse would be too simple for Ginzburg’s purposes. She implies that the lives would have soured no matter which choices were made. The postwar social breakdown, not to mention the human condition itself, brings on the private catastrophes of Family. Not until the very end do Carmine and Ivana talk about the baby they lost to polio, yet having suffered that agony together is the one thing that keeps them close. During a bout of pneumonia, “while his temperature was climbing, [Carmine] found himself thinking that the best part of his existence was Ivana and all that surrounded her. No other source gave him that vital something which made him more intelligent, less ordinary, and stronger.” 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. 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. This essay is part of our special issue “ Reading Natalia Ginzburg.” The special issue includes Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s “ Preface” to Natalia Ginzburg’s collection of essays A Place to Live.

Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter G" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Retrieved 25 July 2014. 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. 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. 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. NYRB: Jhumpa Lahiri & Cynthia Zarin discuss Natalia Ginzburg's Valentino & Sagittarius". Community Bookstore. 2020-08-13 . Retrieved 2020-10-29.Natalia Ginzburg ( Italian: [nataˈliːa ˈɡintsburɡ], German: [ˈɡɪntsbʊʁk]; née Levi; 14 July 1916 – 7 October 1991) was an Italian author whose work explored family relationships, politics during and after the Fascist years and World War II, and philosophy. She wrote novels, short stories and essays, for which she received the Strega Prize and Bagutta Prize. Most of her works were also translated into English and published in the United Kingdom and United States.

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’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. As the author walks through this remembered winter, she describes to her reader whatever details catch her eye in bright focus. But there is also darkness in “Winter in the Abruzzi,” shadowy figures she does not allow us to see clearly: her family. Her children, never referred to as anything less than a plurality, remain faceless and nameless throughout. Her husband, sometimes walking with his arm linked through hers, sometimes working near her at the table, sometimes consulted like an oracle by the people they live among, his only name the one they give him, the professor, is a presence not a character. We are told less about Ginzburg’s family than about the cleaning woman, the shop owner, the neighbors. All that we know of her family is what can be shown by the shape of their absence. They do not exist in this essay; they haunt it. Mai devi domandarmi (1970). Never Must You Ask Me, transl. Isabel Quigly (1970) – mostly articles published in La Stampa between 1968-1979 Some years later I reviewed her novel No Way ( Caro Michele in the Italian edition) for The Nation. The review somehow found its way to her (not by my doing) and she wrote me a warm, appreciative letter. I was pretty sure she didn’t connect the reviewer with the young person who had sat, awkward and near-speechless, in her living room. Still, I felt happily relieved, as if I had redeemed myself in her sight.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. Vita immaginaria (1974). A Place to Live: And Other Selected Essays, transl. Lynne Sharon Schwartz (2002)