A Place To Live: And Other Selected Essays of Natalia Ginzburg

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Natalia Ginzburg or the Possibilities of the Bourgeois Novel” by Italo Calvino, translated from Italian by Stiliana Milkova and Eric Gudas

Her simplicity is an achievement, hard-won and remarkable, and the more welcome in a literary world where the cloak of omniscience is all too readily donned.”—William Weaver, 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: Carmine’s fatal illness starts with mild symptoms that refuse to go away. Very soon he is in the hospital with an illness that has a long, intimidating name. Yet as in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, every detail suggests that the man’s life has created the illness, is the illness: his confusion about social class, his all-too-human equivocation, his failure to discover who he is and how he should properly live. As Carmine dies, Ginzburg, like Tolstoy, vaults beyond the moral and psychological parameters she has set up — not to a vision of spiritual redemption, though, but to something far more primal and rooted.Natalia Ginzburg comes to us with absolute clarity amid the veils of time and language.” –Rachel Cusk, author of the Outlinetrilogy Ginzburg, Natalia, “Winter in the Abruzzi.” A Place to Live. Translated by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Seven Stories Press, 2002. 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)

This special issue “Reading Natalia Ginzburg” (February 2021) responds to the renewed interest in her writing in the Anglophone world and posits that Ginzburg’s texts capture many of our own struggles today. As Katrin Wehling-Giorgi comments in her contribution: 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. 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.

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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. 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. 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 Natalia Ginzburg witnessed the rise of Fascism in her native Italy, the second world war, the death of her husband in prison. The essays collected in this book are haunted by the past, by her confrontation with evil and abject misery, which she survived and others had not. Born in Palermo, Sicily in 1916, Ginzburg spent most of her youth in Turin with her family, as her father in 1919 took a position with the University of Turin. Her father, Giuseppe Levi, a renowned Italian histologist, was born into a Jewish Italian family, and her mother, Lidia Tanzi, was Catholic. [1] [2] Her parents were secular and raised Natalia, her sister Paola (who would marry Adriano Olivetti) and her three brothers as atheists. [3] Their home was a center of cultural life, as her parents invited intellectuals, activists and industrialists. At age 17 in 1933, Ginzburg published her first story, I bambini, in the magazine Solaria.

On Female Genius: A Conversation with Italian Writer and Ginzburg Biographer Sandra Petrignani,” translated from Italian by Stiliana Milkova and Serena Todesco Lynne Sharon Schwartzis the author of over 25 books, including the novels Disturbances in the Fieldand Leaving Brooklyn, and the poetry collections In Solitary(2002) and See You in the Dark(2012).Her translations from Italian include Smoke Over Birkenau(1998), by Liana Millu, and A Place to Live: Selected Essays of Natalia Ginzburg(2003). Her most recent book is the story collection, Truthtelling. Ginzburg' writing reminds me of Joan Didion's. She is self-deprecating, describing herself as lazy, or slow, or unintelligent, or always fearful. And yet her essays are well-written with a flowing style. She can write with wit and an eye for detail. Big ideas are laid out with remarkable structure and precision, always getting right to the heart of the matter. Or, as Natalia Ginzburg puts it in her essay “Silence,” and as the global Covid-19 pandemic has shown, “Today, as never before, the fates of men are so intimately linked to one another that a disaster for one is a disaster for everybody.” 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.

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After her marriage, she used the name "Natalia Ginzburg" (occasionally spelled " Ginzberg") on most subsequent publications. Her first novel was published under the pseudonym "Alessandra Tornimparte" in 1942, during Fascist Italy's most anti-Semitic period, when Jews were banned from publishing.

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. 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.

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] In winter some old person would die of pneumonia, the bells of Santa Maria tolled the death knell, and Domenico Orecchia, the carpenter, built the casket. A woman went crazy and was taken to the asylum at Collemaggio and the whole town talked about it for quite a while. She was young and clean, the cleanest woman in the village: they said it must have been because of her great cleanliness. (37) * 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.