Because of her immature urge to be a Russian or some kind of foreign writer, [Natalia Ginzburg's] early work is curiously abstract; the setting is placeless and timeless and the characters have no surnames. As it develops her fiction becomes gradually more specific and personal and the same time less fictitious; she moves from imitations of Chekhov to a fiction that is indistinguishable from autobiography. Yet from the beginning all her narrative is recounted by the same voice. The voice is feminine and fundamentally that of the author, even though it is attributed in the early fiction to narrators very different from Natalia Ginzburg and simultaneously expressive of these characters. The voice plays over and defines the surface of the narrative, and breaking through to this surface, interwoven with it, are the voices of other characters who are soon perceived as recurring from one story to the next, in a kind of modal counterpoint. Almost without exception her writing is about families. There is a recurrent note of ending; families are fragile things, dispersed by war and deteriorating of their own accord through death, through marriage, through the desire of the children for freedom…. She is particularly a specialist on relations between parents and children, on the affections that hold them together and are at the same time balanced by the antagonisms and struggles that hold them apart, and on the complicated, ambivalent, quasi-sexual and yet chaste relations between brother and sister. In her narrative the family is neither a happy nor an unhappy institution. It simply is, and the people in it are sometimes happy and sometimes unhappy. When the narrating voice is happy it is frequently humorous, and when it is unhappy it regards the situation with irony. In place of Italian lamenting or Jewish lamenting there is a kind of French and existentialist pessimism of acceptance. (pp. 87-8)

[A] perky and slightly rebellious stoicism is the ethical thread of all of Natalia Ginzburg's work…. The tribal toughness is assertive and cranky in the male, resilient, intuitive, and conceding in the female. The family is presented totally without sentimentalism. Like a pride of lions they are held together by powerful biological forces, yet each is wary and self-contained, skeptical of the others, ironic of the father's claim to dominance but conceding to power after the first ritual scratches. The family forms through marriage and birth, consolidates, then gradually disintegrates. Commonly the narrator is a semi-spectator in this process; particularly in Valentino, Sagittario, and Lessico familiare she takes only a peripheral part in the drama and her primary function is to record the voices of others. Natalia Ginzburg only reluctantly writes about herself, even in the book that purports to be a kind of autobiography…. Ginzburg has no pretensions to … [Flaubertian] objectivity; with a quite cheerful humility she confines herself to the small scale of her own knowledge and observation. She is a kind of compassionate tape-recorder, and one that filters language so as to allow only a subtly chosen pattern of assonances to arrive at the ear of the listener.

The voices of the family resemble each other and yet are distinctive. (pp. 88-9)

È Stato cosí, an early short novel, begins with a pistol-shot in the manner of Simenon. Natalia Ginzburg gropes for a manner and tentatively takes up the roman-policier, but soon falls into the voice that threads its way through her work from its earliest stories…. Her work is full of … insignificant details that are [significant because they contribute to the mood]. The story-telling consciousness is easily distracted; when its eye falls on something of a curious shape, or even the most ordinary of objects, it often loses the thread or seems to. (p. 90)

The naivete of the story-telling voice in [È stato cosí] and in La strada che va in città, dating from 1946–47 and 1941 respectively, develops into a kind of sibylline and oblique simplicity in Tutti i nostri ieri (1952) and Lessico familiare (1963), without losing either its freshness of diction or its fundamental innocence. One of the more intricate aspects of her work is the relation of this voice to the sub-voices of the secondary characters…. At other times and particularly in Le voci della sera (1961) a kind of dixit device is used, borrowed with a perceptible suggestion of tongue-in-cheek from the epic. Characteristic remarks, made not at any particular time but simply typical of the character and embedded in the family consciousness, are presented in a kind of litany punctuated with dice [he says] or diceva [she says]…. (pp. 90-1)

A somewhat more intricate dialogue form is a kind of erlebte Rede in which the primary narrating voice, while retaining its own timbre and its particular irony towards events and characters, descends to assume at least partially the rhythm and speech-pattern of the character whose remarks are reported…. The whole narrative oeuvre of Natalia Ginzburg, seemingly so rich in character, actually resides in the consciousness of [a] single narrator, the possessor not only of a keen auditory memory but of an extraordinary and flexible talent for mimicry.

The dixit device is not the only Homeric borrowing in Natalia Ginzburg. There is a suggestion of the epic manner as well in [the] way of dipping downward into the voice of a character and then rising again to regard the flow of narrative with detachment…. The world of her body of narrative is a feminine world. It is a world in which tea-pots and the making of babies are important but politics, business, and war are not; or, more precisely, in which politics, business, and war are recognized as affecting the destinies of all, but not susceptible of feminine control, and therefore viewed with a combination of indifference and irony that rescues the narrating ego from total impotence. To be ironic about a power over one's destiny is no longer to be totally in the control of that power. The narrating consciousness takes refuge in a world of trivia, but the trivia are in some way elevated to the archetypal. Furniture, family quarrels, broken engagements, bicycles, the way of washing windows: the tiny details, massed together and linking one by one, begin finally to form vague metaphysical shapes. The dominant shape that emerges, subsuming and strengthening the others, is a recognition of the tragic sense of life, a pessimism relieved by good humor…. The obscure force that holds together brother and sister, part jealousy and part affection, a hatred at its roots, is a persistence that transcends politics. (pp. 91-3)