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.

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.Lessico famigliare (1963). Family Sayings, transl. D.M. Low (1963); The Things We Used to Say, transl. Judith Woolf (1977); Family Lexicon, transl. Jenny McPhee (2017) 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 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.

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..", The dressmaker divided the world into two camps: those who comb their hair and those who don’t. (38) The lore of her large, loving, and discordant family provides rich material for Ginzburg’s engrossing autobiographical novel.”— Publishers Weekly In this collective winter of our exile, I admit to you that rereading this essay has become a furtive searching for some way to avoid living through what has already happened, is happening, will happen. Some way to circumvent the tragedy she details here, the loss of her love yes, but also the tragedy of an understanding that comes too late and so is useless. 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.

Other books by Natalia Ginzburg

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. So why doesn’t this story have the emotional richness of Family? Unlike Carmine, a tangled, tormented character, Ilaria’s emotional life is hollow: that is the essence of her tale, the reason why a friend suggests she get a cat. But her hollowness can’t carry the weight of the narrative as Carmine’s complexity does. The surrounding characters, while never dull, do not work their way into the heart. Compared to Family, Borghesia seems something Ginzburg might have tossed off as a companion piece. Even the humor is broader and lighter than in Family.

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. Reading Natalia Ginzburg” introduces the general reader to Ginzburg’s life and writing; it explores the texts, voices, bodies, and spaces that define her style and subject matter; and highlights the work of her translators. It constructs an accessible scaffolding with multiple points of view and multiple points of entry.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.

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. 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. 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) 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] Chloe Garcia Roberts is a poet and translator from the Spanish and Chinese.She is the author of a book of poetry, The Reveal, which was published as part of Noemi Press’s Akrilika Series for innovative Latino writing. Her translations include Li Shangyin’s Derangements of My Contemporaries: Miscellaneous Notes(New Directions), which was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, and a collected poems of Li Shangyin published in the New York Review Books / Poets series.Her translations of children’s literature include Cao Wenxuan’s Feather(Archipelago Books/Elsewhere Editions) which was an USBBY Outstanding International Book for 2019, and Decur’s When You Look Up(Enchanted Lion) which was named a Best Children’s Book of 2020 by the New York Times. Her essays, poems, and translations have appeared in the publications BOMB, Boston Review, A Public Space, and Gulf Coastamong others. She lives outside Boston and works as managing editor of Harvard Review.The three parts of “Reading Natalia Ginzburg” that I have outlined here are in fact interconnected, each illuminating aspects of the other two, presenting a view at once panoramic and up-close. 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. 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] 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]