Analysis
From her first short stories and novellas published in the 1930’s and 1940’s to her epistolary novels of the 1970’s and 1980’s, Natalia Ginzburg provides a female perspective on the Italian bourgeoisie during a period of widespread social change. Viewed in its entirety, her career shows a progression from the short story toward the more sustained form of the novel, with a developing interest in the theater. Her dominant themes, which can be related in part to her affinity to Cesare Pavese, revolve around the inevitability of human suffering and isolation, the impossibility of communication, the failure of love, the asymmetries in modern Italy between urban and rural existence, and the influence of the family on the individual human person.
Ginzburg’s early novels, The Road to the City and The Dry Heart, both present first-person female narrators whose interior monologues focus on human emotions rather than external events. Relatively little happens in these early works, which are generally low-key in tone, straightforward in plot structure, and uncomplicated in lexicon and syntax. The elemental character of Ginzburg’s prose makes her work accessible to students whose knowledge of Italian may still be rudimentary. In fact, her clear and direct approach to writing has won for her high praise as a stylist. Her later novels depend more on dialogue than on description, and her talent for reproducing realistic speech patterns expresses itself with equal felicity in her writings for the theater.
With Family Sayings, which is generally considered to be her best novel, Ginzburg introduced a more openly autobiographical element into her work. A chronicle of the author’s family life during fascism, the Resistance, and the immediate postwar period, Family Sayings testifies to the author’s statement that memory provides the most important stimulus for her writing. Her interest in the family as a social unit is also manifest in her other works of the 1970’s and 1980’s and underlies such epistolary novels as No Way and The City and the House, as well as works as diverse as the novel Family and the scholarly biography The Manzoni Family.
The Road to the City recounts the experience of a sixteen-year-old-girl, Delia, whose boredom with her squalid peasant environment leads her into the trap for which she seems destined. Blinded by the glitter of city life (as personified in her older, more sophisticated sister), she allows herself to be seduced by a young law student named Giulio, for whom she feels only a superficial attraction. She becomes pregnant and marries Giulio while her cousin and true friend, Nino, dies from abuse of alcohol and frustration at being unable to establish a meaningful relationship with her. During the wedding ceremony, Delia realizes that she is marrying a man she does not love, but she fails to realize the underlying circumstances that have caused her to enter into a loveless marriage. This study in disillusionment contains the typical elements of Ginzburg’s early work: Her narrator-protagonists are naïve and simple young women who find themselves attracted to the charms of city life but are ultimately disappointed by the role that society offers them.
The Dry Heart
Relying on similarly uncomplicated stylistic devices, The Dry Heart recounts a murder story from the perspective of a first-person female narrator, a young schoolteacher from the country whose life in the city is full of disappointments. Like Delia, she enters into a loveless marriage. Unable to draw her husband away from his mistress, the unnamed narrator-protagonist kills him, seemingly against her own will. The murder is related in the novel’s opening paragraphs, and the bulk of the novel...
(This entire section contains 1651 words.)
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is made up almost entirely of a monologue in which the protagonist seeks to justify and to understand her own actions. The detached, isolated “I” that appears throughout the narrative mirrors the naïveté, passivity, and resignation of the main character. Brief units of dialogue are embedded in blocks of the narrator’s monologue, which is almost completely bereft of commas. This singular punctuation helps create the monotonous, despairing tone of a novel that treats the inability of human beings to establish mutually satisfactory relationships. The failure of a marriage leads to murder and to the protagonist’s own drift toward suicide.
Dead Yesterdays
With Dead Yesterdays, Ginzburg’s fiction took a significant step forward. Her first novel of a substantial length, this work seeks to add a historical dimension missing from her previous fiction. Composed while neorealism was enjoying its brief moment in the sun, Dead Yesterdays abandons the first-person narrative style of the early short novels in favor of the third person.
The novel centers on the sufferings of two Italian families during the reign of fascism, the war, and the Resistance; the book’s plot structure is more developed than the author’s previous work, and external events have a greater importance. Indeed, Dead Yesterdays seeks to tell the story of an entire generation. For the first time, Ginzburg’s strange heroes become involved in the broader fabric of social reality. An unnamed industrial city in the North and a fictional village in the South constitute the settings. The main characters include Anna, the younger sister in the less wealthy of the two families; Concettina, her elder sister; and Cenzo Rena, an intellectual of the Left whose commitment to social problems furnishes Ginzburg’s fiction with a successfully drawn portrait of an engagé figure. His decision to take the blame for the death of a German soldier is tantamount to suicide, but it saves the villagers from a brutal Nazi reprisal. His politically motivated self-sacrifice brings the novel to an end on a positive note.
The 1950’s and the 1960’s witnessed a fruitful development in Ginzburg’s maturing narrative production. In 1951, she wrote Valentino, a novella published in 1957 together with Sagittario (Sagittarius) and La madre (the mother) in a single volume. These three novellas were awarded the Viareggio Prize of 1957 and further express Ginzburg’s continuing preoccupation with the power of the family as a social unit.
Voices in the Evening
In the early 1960’s, Ginzburg lived with her husband in London, where in the spring of 1961 she wrote Voices in the Evening. Set completely in Italy in an unnamed provincial town, Voices in the Evening chronicles the disintegration of an Italian middle-class family. Through a series of flashbacks (each one a portrait of a different member of the family), Ginzburg alternates dialogue with the narrator’s monologue. Against a backdrop of fascism and the war and its aftermath, once again the coming-of-age of a young woman, Elsa, provides the focal point for Ginzburg’s nostalgic narrative. Elsa’s unhappy affair with Tommasino, a young man whose family background renders him incapable of giving love, is presented in the flat, unsentimental narrative style that has become Ginzburg’s trademark.
Family Sayings
Family Sayings was awarded the Strega Prize in 1964 and is regarded by many critics as the author’s major work. Having grown up in the antifascist atmosphere of Turin, Ginzburg manages to capture the feeling of an entire epoch in recounting the minimal details of her own family life. In Family Sayings, Ginzburg draws a portrait of the people who have mattered the most in her private world, many of whom, it should be noted, such as Leone Ginzburg, Filippo Turati, and Cesare Pavese, have also played a significant role in Italian culture and politics. Paradoxically, the openly autobiographical element of Family Sayings, the turning inward to mine her own private stock of memories, seems to have sharpened Ginzburg’s abilities as an observer of social reality, abilities that she puts to good use in her three volumes of essays.
No Way and Family
In the epistolary novel No Way, one finds the themes that Ginzburg elaborates throughout the previous four decades, but here they are brought into the context of the social unrest of Italy in the 1970’s: The unhappy marriage of a middle-class Roman couple has disastrous effects on their offspring. The exchange of letters between the novel’s various characters revolves around Michele, the young protagonist, who moves to London, where he marries an alcoholic divorcée, and who later dies in Bruges at the hands of a group of neofascists. From a technical standpoint, the epistolary structure of the novel allows Ginzburg to experiment with multiple monologues and multiple points of view.
Family and Borghesia, the titles of the two novellas that make up the volume Family, indicate the twin themes that Ginzburg has pursued throughout her career. As in the novel that preceded this work, here she brings her focus on the Italian bourgeois family into the highly charged political atmosphere of Italy in the 1970’s.
The City and the House
With The City and the House, Ginzburg returns to the epistolary form used a decade earlier in No Way. Her cast of letter-writing characters includes the protagonist Giuseppe, a middle-aged Italian who, in emigrating to New Jersey, cuts himself off from his friends and his roots. The letter as a technical device also fits well with Ginzburg’s attempt to fashion a sparse, unadorned style intended to reproduce the rhythms of actual speech. Her focus on the common objects and conflicting emotions of daily life has led critics to compare her work with that of Anton Chekhov.
At the same time, as critic Allan Bullock has suggested (an intuition confirmed by the author herself), Ginzburg’s use of dialogue beginning in the early 1960’s owes a debt to a writer very different from Chekhov: the English novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett. Ginzburg’s most accomplished novels, Voices in the Evening and Family Sayings, combine elements of autobiography, memory, and emotion within the broader context of historical events and social change. Ginzburg’s gift for interweaving the private and the social, the personal and the historical in a simple, straightforward prose style may be her most significant contribution to Italian letters.
