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.

Although Natalia Ginzburg was able to live relatively free of harassment during World War II, her husband Leone was sent into internal exile because of his anti-Fascist activities, assigned from 1941–1943 to a village in Abruzzo. She and their children lived most of the time with him. [5] 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.Despite the disingenuously modest stance of several of the essays (“I don’t know anything about politics,” for example, as the opening of the astute “An Invisible Government”), hers was a life spent at the center of Italian culture; she even served for one term in Parliament. She enjoyed a close circle of literary friends whose work she did not hesitate to criticize sternly when she saw fit—Alberto Moravia, for one, or Giulio Einaudi, as evidenced in “No Fairies, No Wizards.” 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. Serena Cruz o la vera giustizia (1990). Serena Cruz, or The Meaning of True Justice, transl. Lynn Sharon Schwartz (2002) 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. History’s Inexorable Demands”: An Excerpt from Sandra Petrignani’s La corsara, translated from Italian by Minna Zallman Proctor

The dressmaker divided the world into two camps: those who comb their hair and those who don’t. (38) 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. Sometimes I catch myself humming the words of this song, and then the whole village rises up before me, bringing the special flavor of its seasons, the icy gusts of wind, the sound of the bells. 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….Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter G" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Retrieved 25 July 2014.

Ginzburg, Natalia, “Winter in the Abruzzi.” A Place to Live. Translated by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Seven Stories Press, 2002.

and other selected essays of

A glowing light of modern Italian literature…Ginzburg’s magic is the utter simplicity of her prose, suddenly illuminated by one word that makes a lightning stroke of a plain phrase…As direct and clean as if it were carved in stone, it yet speaks thoughts of the heart.”—Kate Simon, The New York Times Crocetta was our cleaning woman. She wasn’t a woman, actually, since she was only fourteen years old. The dressmaker found her for us. The dressmaker divided the world into two camps: those who comb their hair and those who don’t. You have to steer clear of those who don’t comb their hair, for of course they have lice. Crocetta combed her hair, and therefore she came to work for us and told the children long stories of deaths and cemeteries. Once upon a time there was a child whose mother died. His father married a new wife and this stepmother didn’t love the boy. So she killed him while the father was out in the fields, and made a stew out of him. The father came home and ate, but when he finished, the bones left on the plate started singing: 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.