A Place to Live: And Other Selected Essays

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NYRB: Jhumpa Lahiri & Cynthia Zarin discuss Natalia Ginzburg's Valentino & Sagittarius". Community Bookstore. 2020-08-13 . Retrieved 2020-10-29. 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..",

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.” 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.Opponents of the Fascist regime, she and her husband secretly went to Rome and edited an anti-Fascist newspaper, until Leone Ginzburg was arrested. He died in incarceration in 1944 after suffering severe torture. [5] Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) was an Italian writer, translator, playwright, and essayist. She worked as an editor at Italy’s premier publishing house Einaudi, alongside authors such as Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino. She was at the center of Italy’s flourishing post-war cultural industry, and in 1963 her novel Family Lexicon won the most prestigious Italian prize for literature, the Premio Strega. Her works include novels, collections of short stories and essays, plays, and literary criticism. She translated Flaubert and Proust. 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. 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. Vita immaginaria (1974). A Place to Live: And Other Selected Essays, transl. Lynne Sharon Schwartz (2002)

Clear, honest, quietly strong … Ginzburg compels us to examine the smallest and largest aspects of our lives in a way that is inspiring and exhilarating … Carefully chosen and beautifully translated by the American writer Lynne Sharon Schwartz.” –Sian Williams, Times Literary Supplement 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 There is no one quite like 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.”—Phillip Lopate 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.My husband died in Regina Coeli prison in Rome a few months after we left the village. When I confront the horror of his solitary death, of the anguished choices that preceded his death, I have to wonder if this really happened to us, we who bought oranges at Girò’s and went walking in the snow. I had faith then in a simple, happy future, rich with fulfilled desires, with shared experiences and ventures. But that was the best time of my life, and only now, now that it’s gone forever, do I know it. 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.

Arguably one of Italy's greatest contemporary writers, Natalia Ginzburg has been best known in America as a writer's writer, quietly loved by her fellow wordsmiths. This collection of personal essays chosen by the eminent American writer Lynne Sharon Schwartz from four of Ginzburg's books written over the course of a lifetime, was a many-years long project for Schwartz. These essays are deeply felt, but also disarmingly accessible. Selected from Le piccole virt, Mai devi domandarmi, and Vita immaginaria, here are autobiographical essays about the life of a writer, motherhood, the hardship of the years immediately following World War II in Italy, and also on searching for an apartment, and starting a new job. Full of self-doubt and searing insight, Ginzburg is merciless in her attempts to describe herself. Paradoxically, her self-deprecating remarks reveal her deeper confidence in her own eye and writing ability.

and other selected essays of

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

Ginzburg’s sentences are compact and satisfying in their directness, yet they are also redolent with emotional fat (just the thing to ingest when experiencing a winter of your own). Behind the exactness of her almost journalistic observations, the strange and resonant details she includes are surreal, dreamlike. 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. 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…. 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.”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) 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. Ginzburg spent much of the 1940s working for the publisher Einaudi in Turin in addition to her creative writing. They published some of the leading figures of postwar Italy, including Carlo Levi, Primo Levi, Cesare Pavese and Italo Calvino. Ginzburg's second novel was published in 1947.