SOURCE: O'Healy, Anne-Marie. “Natalia Ginzburg and the Family.” Canadian Journal of Italian Studies 9, no. 32 (1986): 21-36.

[In the following essay, O'Healy discusses the theme of family in Ginzburg's work.]

Natalia Ginzburg has been described by Cesare Garboli as “la scrittrice più femminile e meno femminista che esista.”¹ If we accept the traditional assumption that one of the typical characteristics of women writers is an absorbing preoccupation with family relationships, then Garboli's statement about the strikingly “female” quality of the author's work can be accepted. With regard to the more complex and controversial question of feminism, however, his contention is debatable. Although in recent years Natalia Ginzburg has declared herself opposed to the women's movement², there is a contrast between her current denial of feminist sympathies, and the sensitive portrayal of the alienation of women found in her early novels. Few writers have described as poignantly as Ginzburg the situation of women as “outsiders” in the traditional Italian family, and the feminine internalization of patriarchal norms. This inspiration which dominates her first six novels, has, however, been discarded in recent years. It is the purpose of this study to investigate the radical shift in thematic preoccupation which occurred in the middle of the author's career.

Although Ginzburg, during the past decade or so, appears to have abandoned her interest in the problems of women, her fascination with the institution of the family still persists. The household looms large in all of the author's writing. It is the uncontested given which provides the parameters of her fictional world. Lilia Crescenzi has aptly named her “la poetessa dell'ambiente domestico”³, for all her works unfold against the backdrop of the home and are circumscribed by the concerns of this limited setting. Even important events of history—the rise of Fascism, the Second World War and the terrorism of the 1970s—are glimpsed only to the extent that they impinge upon the lives of a particular household. Yet two quite different attitudes towards the family prevail in Ginzburg's writing: the first, an increasingly critical view, is expressed in the novels which precede the autobiographical Lessico famigliare (1963), and the second, characterized by a profound nostalgia for the disciplined stability of the patriarchal family, is voiced implicitly or explicitly in most of the works she has written since that time. Both attitudes are pessimistic, but in the early period the author's pessimism is alleviated by a mood of gentle irony or melancholy, whereas in more recent years this mood has given way to an unrelenting despair.

All of Ginzburg's works preceding Lessico famigliare evoke a dismal picture of traditional family life and offer an implicit condemnation of family relationships. The chief focus of this subtle attack is parental insensitivity towards the needs of the younger generation, particularly towards those of the daughters. Within the traditional family which she depicts daughters are discounted or exploited, and all expectations of achievement are invested in the sons. Both daughters and sons grow up to form unhappy, uncommunicative marriages, and so, it is implied, the cycle is perpetuated from generation to generation. Yet, despite the bleak moral implications which this pattern conveys there is no overt demonstration of malice in Ginzburg's families (with the exception of the brutish father in her first novel, La strada che va in città, published in 1942). Alan Bullock has justly pointed out that the author's characters are never the victims of active forces directed against them, but are essentially the casualties of passive indifference or good-willed incompetence⁴.

In the six novels which precede Lessico famigliare it is always through a daughter's perspective that the varied results of parental repression are demonstrated. All but one of these works are related in the first person by a submissive, self-effacing young woman⁵. In a short story written in 1948, however, a different narrative strategy is used with very effective results. The story, entitled “La madre,” recounts the events which lead to the suicide of a young widow, and is narrated through the combined consciousness of her two small boys. This is one of Ginzburg's most chilling portraits of a woman's alienation within a traditional, conformist family. The ironic distance obtained by the unusual narrative strategy reinforces the theme of the widow's isolation. The boys relate their impressions of their mother with a mixture of bewilderment and shame, for they have absorbed the stereotypical prejudices of the grandparents with whom they all live. The mother's “sin” is her failure to conform to the traditional idea of motherhood. The children, like their grandparents, identify this flaw and openly resent it. The grandmother indicates that the mother's principal mark of strangeness is that she lacks a husband. The boys observe that she also lacks the opulent physique of a “real” mother, and they find it more likely that they might have originated within the body of the grandmother of the housekeeper than within their own mother's thin and wiry frame. In addition she has the strange habit of sobbing herself to sleep, and this behavior, far from inspiring sympathy, serves only to increase the sons' sense of disgusted alienation. The older boy remarks: “un ragazzo ha schifo di sua madre quando piange.” The mother's final depression and suicide (which follow a disappointing love affair) are summarily indicated by the children who have no comprehension of her anguished state of mind. Even at her most vulnerable and pitiable state they remain unsympathetic, seeing only an odd, puppet-like exterior, rendered even less human by the ravages of despair. Throughout the story the language is kept within the limits of the young narrators' psychological perspective, and the reader is able to reconstruct from the jumble of misconstrued information which the boys assimilate the unspoken complexity of the woman's unhappy life.

There is an important passage in “La madre” where we can glimpse the author's fascination with one of the positive qualities of the conventional family, an institution otherwise so destructive to her protagonist. It is this quality, the disciplined stability and protectiveness of traditional domestic life, which will prevail as a nostalgic memory in Lessico famigliare and in all the works she has written in the late 1960's and the 1970's. In the short story the sons give expression to this theme:

La madre non era importante. Era importante la nonna, il nonno, la zia Clementina che abitava in campagna e arrivava ogni tanto con castagne e farina gialla; era importante Diomira, la serva, era importante Giovanni, il portinaio tisico che faceva delle sedie di paglia; tutte queste persone erano importanti per i due ragazzi perche erano gente forte, di cui ci si poteva fidare, gente forte nel permettere e nel proibire, molto bravi in tutte le cose che facevano e pieni sempre di saggezza e di forza: gente che poteva difendere dai temporali e dai ladri.⁶

Here, it is irony rather than nostalgia which inspires Ginzburg's account of the children's perception: although the boys are convinced of the strength and protectiveness of their grandparents (who could be relied upon to ward off “storms and burglars”), the story implicitly condemns these same individuals who offer neither understanding nor protection to their daughter, and with their angry recriminations help to hasten her tragic end.

In the world of Ginzburg's early novels young women are brought up to assume that they are without worth and without identity. They most often seek to fill the void of their ambition with the elusive, destructive quest for romantic love. This is a dominant theme in five of her first six novels, where she shows how women's misguided pursuit of an amorous illusion leads either to painful rejection, or, much more often to lonely, disappointing marriages. In È stato così (1947), Ginzburg's most dramatic study of obsession and repressed identity, it leads even to murder and suicide.

The author's consciousness of the subtle tyranny of family relationships receives its most complex and eloquent expression on Le voci della sera (1962). This novel gives an intimate portrayal of the lives of two middle-class families: that of Elsa, the narrator, and that of Tommasino, her lover, over a span of several years concluding with the post-war period. Here we find a group of female characters who embody with great subtility the “feminine” or potentially feminist themes of the earlier novels. In this work, however, the desolate plight of unfulfilled young women is linked with the desolation of their male counterparts, who are seen as fellow victims of parental insensitivity. This is the first novel in which we find a strong authoritarian father: Balotta, the socialist factory owner. Yet, despite this man's enlightened principles in business and in politics, he treats his family with a gruff off-handedness, and is ruthlessly critical of his sons and daughters as they grow up. All three sons, of whom Tommasino is the youngest, manifest the typical traits of Ginzburg's male characters: they are rich in potential but, because of intolerable domestic pressure, are disappointing in achievement. It is Tommasino who suffers the collective burden of remorse for the wasted existence of the young generation and its unwillingness to follow the example of a highly energetic father. He tells Elsa: “Vedi non c'è in me una vera carica vitale … Tutti quelli che hanno abitato in questo paese prima di me … mi sembra di non essere, io, che la loro ombra”⁷. Tommasino's inability to free himself from his family, his past and the prying provincial community eventually invades and destroys his delicate relationship with Elsa.

Ginzburg herself considers Le voci della sera to be an important turning point in her work. In the two previous decades of her fiction she had made a declared effort to exclude from her narrative any material which might have been prompted by intimate personal memories, for fear of becoming what she described as “sticky and sentimental” (“avevo un sacro orrore dell'autobiografia.. E avevo un sacro terrore di essere attaccaticcia e sentimentale”⁸). It was during a two-year stay in London in the early 1960s that she consciously overcame this inhibition and decided to allow autobiographical inspiration a free rein. She writes in the preface to Cinque romanzi brevi:

Cominciai Le voci della sera … Vidi a un tratto sorgere in quel racconto, non chiamati, non richiesti, i luoghi della mia infanzia … Io tutta la vita m'ero vergognata di quei luoghi. Ma ora invece me li trovavo là, a Londra … Non ci pensai nemmeno a mascherarli: questa volta non l'avrebbero tollerato. E dai luoghi della mia infanzia scaturivano le figure della mia infanzia, e dialogavano fra loro e con me. Ne provai una grande gioia.⁹

This explains the tone of lyrical nostalgia which prevails in the novel. It also seems to explain the puzzling fact that despite the destructive flaws and failings in the two fictional families she depicts, there is nevertheless a strong sense of the author's sympathy and affection for almost all the characters and their surroundings.

The sense of exuberance which Ginzburg reports having experienced when she finally allowed personal reminiscences to flow freely into her writing prompted her, a short time after the conclusion of Le voci della sera, to begin the autobiographical Lessico famigliare, which would win the Strega prize in 1963. This work is preceded by a foreword in which the author makes the rather extraordinary request that her story should not be read as autobiography, but as fiction: “Benché tratto dalla realtà, penso che si debba leggerlo come se fosse un romanzo; e cioé senza chiedergli nulla di più né di meno di quello che un romanzo può dare”¹⁰. This seems to be a warning to those readers who might have hoped to find in Lessico famigliare an accurate documentary of one of the most turbulent and interesting periods in recent Italian memory; an insight into the relationships which the author has enjoyed with people who had since passed into history, and also, perhaps, a glimpse into the mind of the author herself. Such expectations were bound to be disappointed, for Ginzburg totally rejects conventional biographical methods, and her reminiscences unfold in a haphazard, dream-like sequence, where the author appears primarily as the captive observer of others, rarely emerging to the center of the stage.

This work is not merely an account of the author's own family. It is principally an idealistic, yet occasionally ironic, celebration of family life in general, and the power of its affections and its special language (the lessico) to overcome all vicissitudes. It is the only optimistic work that the author has ever written, despite the many allusions to the troubled historical period in which the story of the Levi family unfolds. This family, in the portrait drawn by its youngest member, is solidly bourgeois and patriarchal, but it is depicted in a far more positive light than any of her fictional families.

The evocative power of the lessico is not the exclusive experience of the author-narrator, but is shared by all other members of the family, for whom it revitalizes the past, creating a sense of identity and continuity through the mutual recognition of a shared set of values and rituals. The particular jargon and minutiae of everyday domestic life thus prevails as the foundation of familial solidarity:

Queste frasi sono il nostro latino, il vocabolario dei nostri giorni andati, sono come i geroglifici degli assiro-babilonesi, la testimonianza d'un nucleo vitale che ha cessato di esistere, ma che sopravvive nei suoi testi, salvati dalla furia delle acque, dalla corrosione del tempo. Quelle frasi sono il fondamento della nostra unità familiare, che sussisterà finché saremo al mondo, ricreandosi e risuscitando nei punti più diversi della terra. …”¹¹

Ginzburg's father, Giuseppe Levi, dominates the book, and his loudly intoned sayings remain the most memorable part of the domestic lexicon. He emerges as an aggressive, eccentric and intolerant paterfamilias, and it is his presence which gives thematic focus to passages which at first might seem to have little connective logic. His powerful personality is seen as the great shaping force in all attitudes and customs observed in the household, and all “deviant” tastes held by other family members are kept secret to avoid his displeasure. Although his egocentricity and arrogance are treated by the adult narrator with affectionate irony, it is clear that the child, Natalia, as well as her brothers and sister, regarded him with a mixture of terror and awe¹².

Despite the many graphic details of the character of Giuseppe Levi which are glimpsed throughout Lessico famigliare, the reader is never permitted to perceive him, or indeed any of the other members of the household from a truly adult viewpoint, for the author's childlike essentially two-dimensional characterization of her family prevails right to the end, and contrasts sharply with the more complex character portraits of some adult friends introduced in the latter half of the narrative. This strategy caused a number of critics to find fault with the work. Several reviewers objected specifically to Ginzburg's manneristic characterizations, as well as to her cursory treatment of the historical background. Montale's critique exemplifies this reaction:

… Non per nulla il tempo resta il grande assente della presente cronaca. La narrazione che copre almeno quarant'anni … il prefascismo il fascismo e il post-fascismo visti da un punto di osservazione strettamente individuale, quasi che tutto fosse favola più che ricordo cocente … e spoglia tutto (uomini e cose) della loro gravità per renderli quasi irreali … C'è tutta una folla in questa cronaca di una vita, una folla di gente che fu viva e ora invece vive solo nei suoi tic, nei suoi difetti, e non prevedeva che sarebbe balzata un giorno dalla memoria di Natalia come da una scatola a sorpresa.¹³

Cesare Garboli on the other hand seems to realize that Ginzburg's so-called mannerism was a deliberate choice, but he mistakenly attributes this to an ingenuous sincerity as well as to what he calls “un pudore infallibile”:

Questo pudore è una strana forma di confidenza: non con il lettore, ma con i pubblici fatti della Storia, con i fatti più grandi di noi stesse. E' l'estrema confidenza interiore con la quale un animo infantile, o femminile che è lo stesso, è solita intrattenersi per conto suo coi fatti degli altri, degli adulti. …¹⁴

Yet it seems that Ginzburg's decision to create an aura of unreality around persons and events which were real in the historical sense, as well as the puzzling fact that she herself remains offstage for most of the narrative, deserve a more complex explanation than either Montale or Garboli provides. The motivation for both of Ginzburg's strategies is the same, and is the result of an adult, existential choice. The author's decision to write this story seems to have been prompted by the need to formulate a personal myth which would act as an antidote to the traumatic events of history. In her reminiscences she purposely created an enchanted domain where the kind of self-revelation which might result in acknowledging and reliving the painful experiences of life's vicissitudes is either minimized or excluded¹⁵. In the face of the chaotic cruelty of public events she thus chose to exalt the stability and predictability of traditional family life. It is a passionate nostalgia which inspires her mystification of the Levi household and causes manneristic distortions in character portrayal. The same nostalgia inspires her refusal to openly acknowledge the injustices inherent in her family's rigorously patriarchal principles, of which she herself was so obviously a victim. Lessico famigliare might be considered as Ginzburg's epitaph to bourgeois family life, and it is possible that it was in the very act of writing it that she realized that the kind of family she had set out to remember and to celebrate had disappeared permanently from the face of the earth.

An unrelentingly pessimistic tone characterizes the author's work since the composition of Lessico famigliare. This pessimism reflects her negative reaction to the historical and social changes of the 1960s and 1970s, it is often accompanied by an explicit yearning for the many traditional values and customs which previously gave meaning and direction to the life of the individual. One of the first direct statements of the author's malaise is an essay written in 1969 and entitled “La critica”. In it she mourns the loss of true critics in modern society, and the terms in which she expresses this are quite unique. Her delineation of the ideal critic whom she describes as aloof, stern, yet sometimes compassionate, possesses the traits of the patriarchal father and is clearly reminiscent of the description of her own father in Lessico famigliare. Good critics, she says, are as strong and as protective as good fathers, and both are equally absent from the world of today. She claims: “Se è estinta o quasi estinta la stirpe dei critici, è perché è estinta o si sta estinguendo la stirpe dei padri”, and implies that there is a link between the moral confusion of today's world and the demise of the patriarchal family. In this essay she also formulates a perception of contemporary human-kind as orphans in quest of a father, a theme which prevails in all her subsequent writing:

Da tempo orfani, noi generiamo degli orfani, essendo incapaci di diventare noi stessi dei padri: e così inutilmente andiamo cercando in mezzo a noi … un'intelligenza inesorabile, chiara e altera, che ci esamini con distanza e distacco, che ci osservi dall'alto di una finestra, che non scenda a mescolarsi con noi nella polvere dei nostri cortili; un'intelligenza che pensi a noi e non a se stessa, misurata, implacabile, e limpida nei confronti delle nostre opere, limpida nel conoscerci e rivelarci quello che siamo, inesorabile nel trovare e definire i nostri vizi ed errori. Ma per albergare in mezzo a noi un'intelligenza di questa specie, dovremmo avere nel nostro spirito una lucidità e una purezza di cui tutti oggi siamo privi: e non può aver vita fra noi un essere troppo differente da noi.¹⁶

Another pessimistic essay from the same period as “La critica” is “Sul credere o non credere in Dio”, which is prefaced, significantly, by Simone Weil's statement that “the God whom we must love is absent”.

The eight plays Ginzburg wrote between 1965 and 1971 closely mirror the pessimism of her essays written for the terza pagina. Although some themes from her previous works continue to find expression here, a number of new thematic preoccupations begin to appear with insistent frequency. Chief among these are the disintegration of marriage and the family, as well as the absence of moral responsibility, emotion, memory and hope in the world of today. The later plays in particular focus on the purposeless, unhappy and often parasitic behavior of the new generation. Although these plays, like Ginzburg's novels, often unfold against the background of domestic life, the features of the household have changed utterly. Gone are the solid middle-class structures suggested in her earlier fiction. The new characters inhabit instead rented or borrowed accommodation, sometimes in a state of disrepair and lacking the most basic amenities. Occasionally there is heard an explicit lament for the older, supposedly saner, order of things, now thought to be permanently inaccessible. Titina, a character in La segretaria, wistfully remembers “c'era una volta la famiglia”.

Ginzburg's portrayal of the new generation is not a sympathetic one. The characters in her plays provide a vivid illustration of an opinion voiced in her essay “Vita collettiva”:

Fra le età dell'uomo, quella che oggi è preferita e amata è l'adolescenza: essendo insieme l'età in cui ci si sveglia ai piaceri della vita adulta, e in cui la fatica degli adulti ci è risparmiata. Essa è anche l'età in cui le colpe ci vengono perdonate. Così, il mondo di oggi appare come il regno degli adolescenti; donne e uomini si travestono da adolescenti, qualunque sia l'età che hanno toccata. In questo sogno d'adolescenza, uomini e donne si rassomigliano e si identificano, sembrando voler apparire la medesima cosa: il medesimo essere ambiguo, languido, randagio e soave, indifeso e tenero, con panni colorati e laceri e chiome fluenti immerso in un eterno abbandono, perduto in un eterno pellegrinaggio, senza propositi e senza tempo.¹⁷

These “adolescents” are sometimes depicted in the active pursuit of a surrogate father. Thus Marco in Paese di mare imagines, quite mistakenly, that Alvise, his former friend, is a provident paternal type, endowed with the attributes of magnanimity, wealth and unlimited success. Similarly, Michele in (Dialogo) has an unbounded and enthusiastic admiration for his friend Francesco which renders him quite blind to the fact that this same friend has grotesquely betrayed him. The most extraordinary example of the quest for a father substitute occurs in La segretaria where one characters confesses to another his feelings of filial affection for a horse.

Although the theme of women's destructive social conditioning, so prevalent in Ginzburg's early novels, recurs occasionally in her plays (L'inserzione, Fragola e panna, and La segretaria, all provide examples of women's masochistic dependency on the men they love) it is now subordinate to the author's existential vision of a “fatherless” world. In her interviews over the past decade she has constantly drawn attention to this preoccupation. In 1975, for example, she admitted to Sandra Bonsanti: “Sono molto conoscente della fine dei padri nel nostro mondo: la chiave di tutto sarebbe di ricostruire la figura del padre”¹⁸.

“The end of fathers in our world” is also the theme of Caro Michele, published in 1973. This novel, written largely in the epistolary mode, gives an emblematic account of the moods and vices of our age. Central to the story is Michele, whose mysterious flight to England provides a focus of attention for the other characters, principally as a pretext for communication with each other. All the characters, including Michele and despite his superficial involvement in left-wing politics, are without conviction, commitment or hope. They seem to be oppressed by an overwhelming sense of isolation and unhappiness. Many express a rebellious attitude towards the institution of the family, yet at the same time all are nostalgic for it. The novel traces four marriages in various stages of collapse, and yet, despite the discouraging evidence of reality most characters continue to believe in marriage as a possible solution to their existential anguish.

Ginzburg's preoccupation with the demise of the traditional family is fundamental to the inspiration of this work. At the beginning of the story a baby is born, and, although at first it is suspected to be Michele's child, the question of its paternity remains unanswered in the end. It is also significant that Michele's own father dies early in the narrative, and that his voice is never heard in the epistolary exchange. The only men who do contribute to the correspondence are Michele and his friend Osvaldo, both of whom are believed to be homosexual. For some of the characters in Caro Michele Michele had represented a secret hope for a strong male figurehead, who might be expected to rescue his disintegrating family from anguish and despair. During his lifetime they avert their eyes from the difficult truth, for all but his sister, Viola, refuse to acknowledge his homosexuality. His eventual assassination by a band of right-wing terrorists means the death of hope for the rest of the family, and they numbly survive the loss, continuing their daily existence like sleepwalkers.

The author's latest narrative works, Borghesia and Famiglia, published in a single volume in 1977, re-explore the themes of Caro Michele. Borghesia is related through the perspective of a middle-aged widow (whose husband has died by suicide), and the other story, exceptional in Ginzburg, through that of a forty-two year old man. Both protagonists are, unknown to themselves, terminally ill with cancer. The theme of death in each story is thus intricately interwoven with the two themes suggested in the titles.

We are presented in each story with what at first seems to be a conventional middle-class household, where different generations of the same family live in separate units of the same building. Yet there is no evidence of warmth or genuine communication between the various family members, many of whom lead alienated, unhappy lives. Both protagonists, however, manage to find some small measure of solace outside family relationships. For Ilaria, in Borghesia it is the company of her cats. For Carmine, in Famiglia, it is his friendship with a former lover, Ivana, whose apartment provides a haven for his unhappy spirit. In both stories we are presented with a frenetically unsettled world where couples come together, separate, and pair off in new combinations with a surprising rapidity. Both Ilaria and Carmine are parents of children with whom they fail to establish effective communication. Both are also examples of squandered talent and potential, for neither has lived up to the promise of youthful achievement.

Thus in her works of the 1960s and 1970s Ginzburg has abandoned the potentially feminist and controversial direction of her earlier works for an inexorably pessimistic view of the world. She now shows both men and women as the victims of an identical existential unhappiness. In an orphaned world where the present is meaningless and the future does not exist, many of her recent characters turn their gaze to the past. Memory is an important theme in these works: in the end it is the only value that is salvaged. At the conclusion of Caro Michele, Osvaldo, a close friend of the dead youth, laments, as he gathers a ragged undershirt left behind by Michele, that many of the younger generation fail to grasp the value of memory. For Osvaldo only the remembrance of the past can exorcise the traumatizing reality of the present, and he believes that nothing in our current existence measures up to the moments and places encountered in memory:

Mentre io li vivevo io li guardavo; quegli attimi o quei luoghi, essi avevano uno straordinario splendore, ma perché io sapevo che mi sarei curvato a ricordarli. Mi ha sempre addolorato profondamente che Michele non volesse e non potesse conoscere questo splendore e andasse avanti senza mai voltare la testa indietro. Credo però che lui senza saperlo contemplasse questo splendore dentro di me. E tante volte ho pensato che forse mentre moriva egli ha in un lampo conosciuto e percorso tutte le strade della memoria, e questo pensiero è per me consolante, perché ci si consola con nulla quando non abbiamo più nulla, e perfino aver visto in quella cucina quella maglietta cenciosa che ho raccolto, è stata una strana, gelida, desolata consolazione per me.¹⁹

At the conclusion of Famiglia, the dying Carmine suddenly experiences this therapeutic power which can provide (or so Ginzburg believes) some “strange, icy consolation” in the midst of hopelessness. The final paragraph evokes Carmine's reunion through remembrance with his peasant origins, from which he had long been separated by education, profession and marriage: “A Carmine ora accadeva di guardare lungamente sua madre, seduta sul divano con la sua veste nera, e si ricordava di quando a volte andavano, lui e sua madre, a cercare la crusca per il maiale nei paesi vicini, perchè c'era la guerra e la crusca non si trovava; …”²⁰. Gradually there unfolds a series of hitherto forgotten memories of family happiness: trivial, fragmented details of an outing in the country, which, much to Carmine's surprise, re-emerge with vivid precision after so many years of oblivion.

Ginzburg's insistence on the function of memory is indicative of her profound historical pessimism. In Caro Michele we find her clearest statement of the necessity to reject the present, and the implication that the only mode of survival in an otherwise intolerable world is to regard each moment of actual existence as the material of future reminiscence. This self-conscious standing-back from the present realities of life is, in itself, a strategy of emotional and social alienation and seems to indicate that nothing can be done in the face of the fortuitous violence which permeates our “orphaned” world.²¹ On the positive side, however, the theme of memory is a vindication of the inner, “spiritual” life of the individual, and the resourcefulness of the human imagination in the face of suffering.

Notes

1. Cesare Garboli, “Natalia esplora la famiglia”, Corriere della sera, February 11, 1972, p. 21.

2. Natalia Ginzburg, “La condizione femminile” in La vita immaginaria (Milano: Mondadori, 1974).

3. Lilia Crescenzi, Narratrici d'oggi (Cremona: Cremona Nuova, 1966), p. 76.

4. Alan Bullock, “Natalia Ginzburg and Ivy Compton-Burnett: Creative Composition and Domestic Repression in Le voci della sera”, Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate, September 1977, pp. 203-227.

5. The single exception, Tutti i nostri ieri (1952), is nevertheless recounted through the perspective of Anna, the young protagonist.

6. Natalia Ginzburg, Cinque romanzi brevi (Turin: Einaudi, 1964), pp. 397-398.

7. Ibid., p. 358.

8. Ibid., p. 8.

9. Ibid., pp. 16-17.

10. Natalia Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare (Turin: Einaudi, 1963), p. 5.

11. Ibid., p. 28.

12. Other allusions to the terrified atmosphere which often reigned in this patriarchal household are found in “Infanzia” and “I baffi bianchi”, in Mai devi domandarmi (Milan: Garzanti, 1970).

13. Eugenio Montale, “Lessico famigliare: crudele con dolcezza”, Corriere della sera, July 7, 1963, p. 7.

14. Cesare Garboli, “Natalia esplora fa famiglia”, Il Mondo, February 11, 1972, p. 21.

15. Typical of her unwillingness to indulge in intimate revelations is her treatment in this work of her first marriage and her tragic bereavement. The figure of Leone Ginzburg is briefly, though incisively drawn. Nothing is said of their relationship or the grief she felt for his loss.

16. “La critica” in Mai devi domandarmi, pp. 102-103.

17. “Vita collettiva”, Ibid., pp. 141-142.

18. Interview with Sandra Bonsanti, Epoca, December 6, 1975, pp. 82-86.

19. Caro Michele (Milan: Mondadori, 1973), p. 199.

20. Famiglia (Turin: Einaudi, 1977), p. 69.

21. Among the critics who responded negatively to Ginzburg's implied philosophy of resignation was Oreste Del Buono, who wrote in an review in Il Messaggero, on April 24, 1973: “Peccato che dietro a un simile talento narrativo sia un'ideologia meschina e immeschinante, e che quindi, il successo immancabile di Caro Michele sia da temere, tutto sommato, come pericoloso.”