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

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A friend in Italy sent me a copy of Famiglia when it appeared in 1977. I translated the book for practice. By that time, my Italian was much improved through the courses I had taken for the graduate program that I never completed. Translating it was one of the happiest experiences of my writing life; I almost felt as though I were writing it, as if I were the person with that lucid, witty, and heartbreaking voice.

The Light of Turin: Natalia Ginzburg’s Cityscape” by Roberto Carretta, translated from Italian by Stiliana Milkova Even though she condemns us all to join her, “Our fate spends itself in this succession of hope and nostalgia.” (40), I can’t help rereading, hoping, hopelessly, that she has hidden an answer in the essay, a way to avoid her fate. Putting a Brave Face on Loneliness and Loss: Natalia Ginzburg’s Family and Borghesia” by Jeanne BonnerSerena Cruz o la vera giustizia (1990). Serena Cruz, or The Meaning of True Justice, transl. Lynn Sharon Schwartz (2002)

Eric Gudas, in his afterword, finds this “the most intense, bewitching, and gorgeous passage in all of Ginzburg’s work.” I wouldn’t argue with that. Born in 1916, Ginzburg grew up in Turin in a large and volatile family closely connected to prominent intellectuals and artists; their domestic life is unforgettably portrayed in her 1963 autobiographical novel, Family Sayings (recently reissued under the less apt title, The Things We Used to Say). The tempestuous father who appears in several of the essays was a professor of anatomy and a non-observant Jew. During the 1920s and ’30s, as fascism was taking hold, the family and its circle were actively anti-fascist, and the sense of alienation and combativeness Ginzburg knew in her youth pervades her essays and many novels. She began writing as a child, as she relates with her customary wry self-scrutiny in “My Craft” and “Fantasy Life,” and published her first story at seventeen. 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. 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. In 1964 she played the role of Mary of Bethany in Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew.

On Humor, Eccentricity, and Sound in Family Lexicon: A Conversation with Ginzburg Translator Jenny McPhee” by Eric Gudas and Jenny McPhee

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. Part I, “The Examined Life: Natalia Ginzburg’s Life and Works,” outlines the framework for approaching Ginzburg’s biography and literary production. Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s preface to her translation of Ginzburg’s collection of essays A Place to Live presents Ginzburg the essayist . The contributions that follow—by Andrew Martino and Chloe Garcia Roberts—dwell on Ginzburg’s essays and the lessons they teach us. Jeanne Bonner discusses the paradoxes of Ginzburg’s narratives and their representation of loneliness and loss. Concluding this part are two significant pieces: an excerpt from Sandra Petrignani’s recent biography of Natalia Ginzburg, La corsara, in Minna Zallman Proctor’s translation—an excerpt that depicts Natalia’s life around the time she met and married Leone; and an interview with Sandra Petrignani herself.

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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 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 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. Borghesia, like Family, is rich in character and event, mingling comic blunders with grievous error, and also ends with the protagonist’s death in middle age. The plot, such as it is, turns on the beleaguered widow Ilaria’s growing involvement with cats, three in succession, each with its closely defined nature and habits; the story is punctuated by the arrival then disappearance or death of each — the cats being as subject to the vagaries of fate as are the mostly forlorn characters.