In essay after essay of Mai devi domandarmi, we have a celebrated novelist stripping down her own intellect in the characteristic succession of flat, functional sentences which caused Pavese to call her style a 'lagna' and invite the reader to feel superior and at the same time unaccountably ignored…. [Regarding her article on old age], we finish reading a plot dealing with an unfortunate love affair between a grey, unstriking woman and a grey, unsuccessful man, and the book may then remain in our memory as ill-defined and unsatisfying because it has depicted the twilight world of fractured relationships and unheroic encounters only too exactly: it has borrowed the language and atmosphere of the effect which it aimed to produce. Ginzburg sets out, like Flaubert in Madame Bovary, to reproduce the colour grey and will always run the risk of being accounted a failure because she succeeds in depicting greyness absolutely. (pp. 788-89)

There is an initial soporific effect in all Ginzburg's fiction: its delimitation of the fictional territory to the family. The plots of her main novels and stories all involve one or more family units into which the reverberations of political and historical events in the exterior world are filtered through by reportage of its members as they return centripetally from outside. The reader is thus at once presented with a context that is familiar and undisturbing. No surprise or alarm is elicited by the fictional setting; what is required from the reader is a genteel curiosity. In order to accentuate this impression of routine reality staged inside the walls of a family domicile, Ginzburg adopts the strategy of inserting a first-person narrator into the household so that every event in the novel is related from the limited emotional viewpoint and intellectual involvement of the particular family member conducting the story. The narrator who is providing this io interno is not necessarily the most impressive or attractive member of the household, so that the spectator-reader often faces an entirely plausible but defective or even neurotic interpretation of the events which he is witnessing. This further contributes to the illusion that it is the author herself who is expressing a limited and partial view of the world….

Already [in her second published story, Casa al mare], the writer is uncompromisingly entangled in the emotional stance of the protagonist who has the internal vantage point on events and is simultaneously but not retrospectively conducting the narrative. In Ginzburg's next story, Mio marito (1941), the first-person narrative is shifted for the first time to a female figure emotionally involved in the events described, and this, with one or two exceptions, will remain Ginzburg's standard procedure in the remainder of her published work, except, of course, the plays. The canonical subject matter with its disintegrating marriages, infidelity by one or both partners and concluding suicide is also established by Mio marito, and developed along set lines which will recur with varying degrees of expansion and ornamentation in Ginzburg's subsequent novels. (p. 789)

[In the preface to Cinque romanzi brevi] Ginzburg declares that she had such a horror of surnames that she could never use them fluently until her last novel Le voci della sera, but it is also noticeable that a character's Christian name is usually held back until it is necessary as a device for labelling the speaker or distinguishing between the four or five children in a family who form Ginzburg's average narrative cast. Her characters' names are never fully integrated emotional components of their personality; they are functional tickets for recognition…. In fact, as one moves on to Ginzburg's longer fiction, one can see that there is no qualitative difference between short story and novel as such. The novels seem to differ from the short stories, which have a standard cast of three characters, merely by being longer and expanding this cast to between twelve and twenty, each involved in their own variation on [her recurrent themes of] unhappy love … or disintegrating marriage…. [With her first novel] there was a general impression that the writer had already produced a definitive style: precise, compact and moving along with a rhythm closely matching daily life. She seemed never to indulge in expressions that were superflous to the plot. (pp. 790-91)

[Ginzburg's second novel È stato cosí] consists of a long monologue which is almost completely bereft of commas (Ginzburg later explained that commas are like steps, and steps cost effort, and she was so depressed at the time of composition that she wanted to eliminate all sense of physical effort)…. The manner of the novel is lax, off-hand and grey, a formal orchestration of monotony and hopelessness…. (p. 791)

[The resolution of the plot of Valentino] by a suicide and two parallel domestic arrangements in isolation is the most artificial of Ginzburg's negative statements on life in a closed fictional circuit. All the characters return to a position inferior to the point from which they started out. Each is shifted through an emotional crisis for which he has insufficient strength of will, and the 'greyness' of their final predicament is too explicitly stated…. The tone of [the] final tableau … is close to a pulp fotoromanzo, and indeed it is hard to avoid the impression that the writer has dismissed this particular plot with a somewhat facile conclusion.

Tutti i nostri ieri (… 1952), is the longest of Ginzburg's novels. The book has a maturity and fluency which makes it, together with Lessico famigliare (… 1963), one of the writer's greatest achievements. Its success seems in part a function of its unusual length, which offers the writer scope for a fuller deployment of the intricate inter-relationships of two separately defined family units. The division of the book into two main parts (town/North, country/South) gives it, a much improved structural balance when compared to her previous fiction, where the narrative leaps between urban sophistication and rough countryside can seem sudden and arbitrary. The first part shows the vicissitudes of two quintessentially bourgeois families who live on opposite sides of the same street in an unnamed Northern town. Although for once events are not narrated in the first person, the key character is a younger sister in the less wealthy of the two families, Anna, and the movement of the narrative has the same rhythm as her own adolescent awakening and involvement in the situation which surrounds her. In the early pages of the first part we find a kind of childish filter applied to everyday occurrences, and this distorted perspective by the internal narrator can again be seen as Ginzburg's most sensitive narrative device…. Clearly the device places a kind of natural limit on the collective insight which is permissible in a given situation…. Yet the girl/woman's privileged view of her elder sister Concettina allows the author to present a masterly refinement of the characteristic female, vain and mediocre, which has so far dominated her fiction without being given a fixative portrait. In relation to Concettina, Anna is in a position to hear half-understood gossip at table or the crying behind a locked bedroom door; she witnesses Concettina's gloom in front of a new dress or a bathroom mirror and the continuous politics of fidanzamento as played out by a selfish elder sister. Hence the cumulative picture becomes irresistibly credible…. (pp. 792-93)

[Cenzo Rena] is an inspired fictional creation for Ginzburg: here is the character who can swing the novel's setting to the country and the South…. In fact, Cenzo Rena is a village intellectual and rich man somewhere in Puglia, takes a positive attitude to social problems, and shows a real understanding of political issues in their context…. Thus he provides Ginzburg's fiction with an authentic left-wing engagé figure, and his decision to take the blame for a German soldier accidentally killed in his house—tantamount to an act of suicide—rounds off the second part of the novel with a politically motivated sacrifice which is all the more plausible by being the exact counterpart to the depressive suicide that resolves Ginzburg's story line elsewhere.

This is the only novel, in fact, which ends on a positive note, creating a rift in the otherwise uniformly grey curtain which falls over the Ginzburgian family. The style is misleadingly flat and placid for a story ending in violence and war. Ginzburg is not so much banishing horror or macabre tones from her account as naturalizing them to the point where they lose their power to shock or surprise the reader, who is under the general narcotic of the casual juxtaposition of chatty inconsequentiality and family disaster. The elemental moments of birth or death are thus cut down to the status of a visit or a meal or a new hat…. Still, in Tutti nostri ieri, Ginzburg cannot resist her functional motif of a character's death in isolation…. The novel, in fact, is constructed to include the whole range of Ginsburg's recurring motifs: Giuma's seduction of Anna, Anna's marriage to Cenzo Rena, at first one of convenience, later developing into love, Ippolito's suicide, the nanny's lonely death in a pensione, and the obsessive preoccupation with holidays, clothes and motor car of a prosperous bourgeoisie. But the strength of Tutti i nostri ieri lies both in the working out of Ginzburg's central themes and a sustained combinative interest in the infinite possible permutations of the siblings in two large households. Her attention is focused not on why people do things, but on how they act. New women or girl characters are invariably described by the clothes they wear (colour, fashion, cut, material), and several men in Ginzburg's fiction are presented with a ciuffo or piumacchio of hair, which in subsequent scenes they straighten or throw back from the forehead. This perfunctory characterization, deliberately close to caricature, throws an unusually large part of the reader's attention on to the transactions of the cast, the old unfashionable plot line. (pp. 793-94).

Sagittario is a short, static study in petit-bourgeois femininity…. The resolution of the story is the same pointless solitude that awaits the main characters in Valentino….

[Le voci della sera] is a return to the extended family saga of Tutti i nostri ieri. (p. 794)

[The plot] seems loose and tenuous, and the strength of the novel lies entirely in the texture of shifting fragments of conversation, sketches of past events, reports, juxtaposed blocks of dialogue which recall the particular timbre of a person's voice or the favourite phrases in their everyday vocabulary….

[The ingredients of Lessico famigliare] are those of a journal intime, coolly exhibited to the public, unadorned autobiography where there is no narrative re-invention of the well-known figures or historical events which occur in the text. Her previous narrative family settings finally merge into the author's own family when she was a child, and the internal first-person narrator becomes, as seemed increasingly likely, none other than the author herself. But the self-portrait of a clumsy girl with inferiority complexes is partly the projection of a retrospective literary persona for herself. It strengthens the image of a writer who with perverse humility wishes to appear shocked and surprised at her own success.

Ginzburg, therefore, passes herself off as a product of chance and culture rather than art. (p. 795)