A Place to Live: And Other Selected Essays

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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. 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) On Female Genius: A Conversation with Italian Writer and Ginzburg Biographer Sandra Petrignani,” translated from Italian by Stiliana Milkova and Serena Todesco

On Humor, Eccentricity, and Sound in Family Lexicon: A Conversation with Ginzburg Translator Jenny McPhee” by Eric Gudas and Jenny McPhee Natalia posee una capacidad de entonar en sus páginas, sus palabras te van marcando. Ella vivía en un mundo donde dar juicios era una capacidad masculina, pero alzó la voz sin pensar que ser mujer sería algo que la tuviera que dictaminar para hablar o no.

The essays show a sensibility laid bare. Apart from the impeccable style, a nakedness of thought and emotion—of the contours and dynamics of thought and emotion—is their most arresting quality. Ginzburg delivers the genesis, the embryonic growth, and the full flowering of an idea or sensation as if it were a rare and gleaming mutation from the ordinary. But a reader may want a few facts as well.

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. The experiences that she and her husband had during the war altered her perception of her identification as a Jew. She thought deeply about the questions aroused by the war and the Holocaust, dealing with them in fiction and essays. She became supportive of Catholicism, arousing controversy among her circle, because she believed that Christ was a persecuted Jew. [5] She opposed the removal of crucifixes in public buildings but her purported conversion to Catholicism is controversial and most sources still consider her an "atheist Jewess." [6] 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. 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. 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.

One of Italy’s finest postwar writers. . . . If Elena Ferrante is a master of the sprawling, unputdownable epic, Ginzburg is a miniaturist. Her themes are buried in gestures, fragments, absences—not in what is said, but in what is not said. . . . Her masterpiece—the hyperbole is warranted—is Family Lexicon.”—Negar Azimi, Bookforum

Cynthia Zarin (2020). Introduction. Valentino and Sagittarius. By Ginzburg, Natalia. New York: New York Review Books. pp.vii–xi. ISBN 9781681374741. Credo che il mio sia un problema di antipatia invincibile verso l'autrice, che un tempo ho molto amato con Lessico famigliare. Devo averla idealizzata a partire da quel romanzo, perché tutto quello che ho provato a leggere da quel momento mi ha delusa. Mi erano rimaste le raccolte di non fiction, che per esempio avevo apprezzato con Le piccole virtù. Dopo la biografia di Petrignani, però, acquistata con ardore senza saperne niente, ho scoperto un personaggio che non mi piaceva affatto, schivo, misantropo, timido e difficile con cui relazionarsi, tutte cose che in qualche modo sono anch'io, eppure mi ha allontanata molto dall'autrice. Quella stessa antipatia e incomprensibilita' la ritrovo tutta nella lettura di questi articoli. Le recensioni di libri, film e spettacoli, gli omaggi a editori e critici non mi conquistano, preferisco quelli in cui parla di temi più umani e generici su cui esprime un'opinione. Il suo stile è abile non privo di fascino, tuttavia è anche ingenuo, quasi infantile e alla lunga mi irrita. Questa modestia esibita che la porta ad affermare all'inizio di ogni recensione o omaggio "Non sono un critico, di filosofia sono ignorante..", Some of these essays are dark, probably a result of growing up in a Jewish and anti-fascist family in Italy. Here were the standouts for me: In 1938 she married Leone Ginzburg (their early days together are memorably sketched in “Human Relations”). During their years of political exile in the village poignantly described in “Winter in the Abruzzi,” Ginzburg wrote her first novel, The Road to the City (published in 1942 under a pseudonym because of the racial laws proscribing the rights of Jews). After their return to Rome, Leone Ginzburg was arrested and died in prison at the hands of the fascists in 1944. Left on her own with three children, Ginzburg lived first in Rome, in the state of mind evoked in “My Psychoanalysis” and “Laziness,” then returned to Turin and continued working with the group of writers who formed Einaudi, soon to become Italy’s most distinguished publishing house. In 1950 she married Gabriele Baldini, a professor of English literature, and lived with him in Rome until his death in 1969. (It was through Baldini’s work that she spent time in England and came to write “The Great Lady,” about her discovery of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels.) When I first came to the village, all the faces seemed the same to me; the women, rich and poor, young and old, all looked alike. 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. But soon, little by little, I could single out Vincenzina da Secondina, Annunziata da Addolorata, and I started visiting all the houses and warming myself at their various fires.Cantone, Umberto (4 December 2016). "Memoria e famiglia di Natalia Ginzburg"[Natalia Ginzburg's Memory and Family]. La Repubblica (in Italian) . Retrieved 19 July 2020. 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, Natalia, “Winter in the Abruzzi.” A Place to Live. Translated by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Seven Stories Press, 2002. I had never read anything like them, so simply written (probably one reason why they had been assigned to my intermediate class) and yet so richly evocative of the enormous questions, loss, war, family. I felt I had to know this woman. I was under the common illusion that being face to face with a writer would reveal her spirit, that she would somehow embody the sensibility I revered. I was totally mistaken, as are most readers who gather to see writers in person. The person is not the work; the place where the work comes from is utterly hidden, maybe even to the writer herself. 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….