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

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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. 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 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. Liukkonen, Petri. "Natalia Ginzburg". Books and Writers (kirjasto.sci.fi). Finland: Kuusankoski Public Library. Archived from the original on 1 September 2006. 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.

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: Ginzburg does not spare herself in rebuilding this season gone for her reader. She is unflinching and clear-eyed in her portrayal of herself; the Natalia in the essay, experiences joy and contentment, but also boredom, anger, and simmering resentment. She is frank in sharing how the exile sat heavy on her. She admits freely that no matter the sparkling wonder of the weft, the warp was a numbing mundane, a wearing domesticity. “We would light our green stove with the long pipe running across the ceiling; we used to gather in the rom with the stove—we cooked and ate there, my husband wrote at the big oval table and the children scattered their toys on the floor. A picture of an eagle was painted on the ceiling, and I would stare at the eagle, thinking that that was exile. Exile was the eagle, it was the humming green stove, it was the vast silent countryside and the motionless snow” (36). Human Relations: an essay on our relation to our world and its people as we grow from child to adult "knowing so well how the long chain of human relations takes its course, making its long navigable parable, the whole long road we have to travel to feel, at last, a bit of compassion." (1953)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. 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. The daily ups and downs of our life, the daily ups and downs we witness in others’ lives, all that we read and see and think and discuss feeds its hunger, and it grows within us. It is a craft that thrives on terrible things too; it feeds on the best and the worst in our life, our evil feelings and our good feelings course through its blood. It feeds on us, and it thrives. 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. In 1950, Ginzburg married again, to Gabriele Baldini, a scholar of English literature. They lived in Rome. He died in 1969.

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

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..",

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. 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. 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.)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) The Light of Turin: Natalia Ginzburg’s Cityscape” by Roberto Carretta, translated from Italian by Stiliana Milkova