He [Cenzo Rena] looked out of the window at the refugees from Naples who were now going hither and thither about the lanes of the village, carrying mattresses and babies, he looked and said how sad it was to see all these mattresses carried about here and there all over Italy, Italy was now pouring mattresses out of her ravaged houses. Ippolito, Emanuele and Danilo, we learn, are anti-fascist dissidents, gathering in secret to share and discuss prohibited political literature. Yet in the early years the war is not yet all-consuming and they even go off for their usual summer vacations. As war breaks out in Europe, the moral world of the novel becomes increasingly haunted by the brutality of fascism, and by the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust. Tai pirmoji mano pažintis su žydų kilmės rašytoja Natalia Ginzburg, bet labai tikiuosi, kad ne paskutinė.

You had to sit and grind away at a desk, without either danger or fear, and out came a lot of ignoble words and knew you perfectly well that they were ignoble and you hated yourself like hell for having written them but you didn’t cross them out because there was a hurry to get out the newspaper for which people were waiting. It’s just a question of time before they are herded onto trucks and trains to be shipped to concentration camps. Mas a guerra continuava longe, na Polónia, a Itália não se mexia e Emanuele não sabia o que pensar, dizia que se a Itália não entrasse na guerra o fascismo nunca mais cairia. Another singular feature of the novel is Ginzburg’s wry humour and deadpan wit as reflected in her striking prose style.

Todos os Nossos Ontens" é um livro belíssimo, em que as histórias de diferentes famílias se cruzam, ao longo de anos, tendo como pano de fundo a Itália de Mussolini e a Segunda Guerra Mundial. Residing opposite them is another family – Mammina, the second wife of an old man, along with their two sons, the down-to-earth Emanuele, and the snobbish, uppity Guima.

Through Sally Rooney’s excellent introduction to the novel, we learn how Natalia and her first husband, the Jewish anti-fascist activist Leone Ginzburg, were sent to Southern Italy during the war as a form of internal exile.It begins in a small town in northern Italy, in the years before the war, with a family: an ageing widower, his four children and the family’s companion, Signora Maria. It’s the elder son Ippolito who bears the brunt of his father’s tyranny, forced to assist him with his writing and various other tasks. The second half of the novel is about their life together, and draws directly on Ginzburg’s own memories as during the war she and Leone were sent to live in a village in the Abruzzi. She was alone, she was alone and no one said anything to her, she was alone in her room with her grass-stained, crumpled dress and her violently trembling hands.