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

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Natalia Ginzburg comes to us with absolute clarity amid the veils of time and language.” –Rachel Cusk, author of the Outlinetrilogy El breve ensayo que le da título al libro, Vida imaginaria, es sublime. Si fuera simplemente esas páginas que contiene el ensayo la totalidad del libro le daría un diez. Es capaz de volver a su niñez, caminar entre sus recuerdos y exponernos cómo cambiamos y porqué lo hacemos. Asienta bases y conceptos filosóficos y además aúna una capacidad intelectual al reírse de sí misma. Maravilloso, lo único que pudo decir.

Some years later I reviewed her novel No Way ( Caro Michele in the Italian edition) for The Nation. The review somehow found its way to her (not by my doing) and she wrote me a warm, appreciative letter. I was pretty sure she didn’t connect the reviewer with the young person who had sat, awkward and near-speechless, in her living room. Still, I felt happily relieved, as if I had redeemed myself in her sight.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. Part I, “The Examined Life: Natalia Ginzburg’s Life and Works,” outlines the framework for approaching Ginzburg’s biography and literary production. Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s preface to her translation of Ginzburg’s collection of essays A Place to Live presents Ginzburg the essayist . The contributions that follow—by Andrew Martino and Chloe Garcia Roberts—dwell on Ginzburg’s essays and the lessons they teach us. Jeanne Bonner discusses the paradoxes of Ginzburg’s narratives and their representation of loneliness and loss. Concluding this part are two significant pieces: an excerpt from Sandra Petrignani’s recent biography of Natalia Ginzburg, La corsara, in Minna Zallman Proctor’s translation—an excerpt that depicts Natalia’s life around the time she met and married Leone; and an interview with Sandra Petrignani herself. Natalia Ginzburg escribe para rebatir. En este conjunto de ensayos periodísticos la escritora a través de la opinión intenta buscar un acuerdo entre temas para exponer con la mayor inteligencia que posee una conclusión. Así, nos encontramos con una primera parte llena de reseñas a novelistas, comentarios a cineastas y su parecer sobre personalidades italianas. 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.) This special issue “Reading Natalia Ginzburg” (February 2021) responds to the renewed interest in her writing in the Anglophone world and posits that Ginzburg’s texts capture many of our own struggles today. As Katrin Wehling-Giorgi comments in her contribution:

After her marriage, she used the name "Natalia Ginzburg" (occasionally spelled " Ginzberg") on most subsequent publications. Her first novel was published under the pseudonym "Alessandra Tornimparte" in 1942, during Fascist Italy's most anti-Semitic period, when Jews were banned from publishing. Natalia Ginzburg witnessed the rise of Fascism in her native Italy, the second world war, the death of her husband in prison. The essays collected in this book are haunted by the past, by her confrontation with evil and abject misery, which she survived and others had not. Anyone who is a parent will be familiar with the Greek chorus of elders who punctuate every moment with their admonitions to cherish it as it will be gone from you before you know it. (You almost feel their absence in this essay, however, do they not exist in Italy? Instead, the townspeople say things like “what sin did they commit?” when she takes the children outside for their daily walk, they teach them songs about being eaten alive.) There is a shared implicit understanding that surrounds the domestic, that one must enjoy it, because one must anticipate the future self regarding the present self as ignorantly living the best moments of their life, even though that moment might be emblemized by the time you spend staring at the ceiling.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 In winter some old person would die of pneumonia, the bells of Santa Maria tolled the death knell, and Domenico Orecchia, the carpenter, built the casket. A woman went crazy and was taken to the asylum at Collemaggio and the whole town talked about it for quite a while. She was young and clean, the cleanest woman in the village: they said it must have been because of her great cleanliness. (37) * This special issue would not have come into existence had it not been for Eric Gudas’s astute eye and profound knowledge of Natalia Ginzburg’s works. I am grateful to all the contributors for their time, immense expertise, and enthusiasm. “Reading Natalia Ginzburg” gives space to voices that are diverse and deep, moved by respect and passion.

Vita immaginaria (1974). A Place to Live: And Other Selected Essays, transl. Lynne Sharon Schwartz (2002) Liukkonen, Petri. "Natalia Ginzburg". Books and Writers (kirjasto.sci.fi). Finland: Kuusankoski Public Library. Archived from the original on 1 September 2006.As the author walks through this remembered winter, she describes to her reader whatever details catch her eye in bright focus. But there is also darkness in “Winter in the Abruzzi,” shadowy figures she does not allow us to see clearly: her family. Her children, never referred to as anything less than a plurality, remain faceless and nameless throughout. Her husband, sometimes walking with his arm linked through hers, sometimes working near her at the table, sometimes consulted like an oracle by the people they live among, his only name the one they give him, the professor, is a presence not a character. We are told less about Ginzburg’s family than about the cleaning woman, the shop owner, the neighbors. All that we know of her family is what can be shown by the shape of their absence. They do not exist in this essay; they haunt it. The end of winter awakened a vague restlessness in us. Maybe someone would come to visit, maybe something would finally happen. Surely our exile, too, must have an end. The roads cutting us off from the world seemed shorter, the mail came more often. All our chilblains slowly healed. On Humor, Eccentricity, and Sound in Family Lexicon: A Conversation with Ginzburg Translator Jenny McPhee” by Eric Gudas and Jenny McPhee

An activist, for a time in the 1930s she belonged to the Italian Communist Party. In 1983, she was elected to Parliament from Rome as an independent politician.

Other books by Natalia Ginzburg

Carmine’s fatal illness starts with mild symptoms that refuse to go away. Very soon he is in the hospital with an illness that has a long, intimidating name. Yet as in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, every detail suggests that the man’s life has created the illness, is the illness: his confusion about social class, his all-too-human equivocation, his failure to discover who he is and how he should properly live. As Carmine dies, Ginzburg, like Tolstoy, vaults beyond the moral and psychological parameters she has set up — not to a vision of spiritual redemption, though, but to something far more primal and rooted. In 1964 she played the role of Mary of Bethany in Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew.