All Our Yesterdays (Tutti i nostri ire) by Natalia Ginzburg
“There is a certain dull
uniformity in human destiny,” reflected the ‘great small’ writer Natalia
Ginzburg, some years before her death. “The course of our lives follows ancient
and immutable laws, with an ancient, changeless rhythm. Dreams never come true,
and the instant they are shattered, we realize how the greatest joys of life
lie beyond the realm of reality. The instant they are shattered we are sick
with longing for the days when they flamed within us. Our fate spends itself in
this succession of hope and nostalgia.” It is a tone—this weariness, this resignation—that
permeates her fiction, which, while ever fresh and compelling, is like a
sitting room at dusk.
Her novel All Our Yesterdays is no exception, this
otherwise straightforward tale drawn back and forth through the skein of her
own rueful experience of life, lending it a somber, doleful intimacy that is
the mark of Ginzburg’s work. As in the prose of Marcel Proust (whose work she greatly
admired: she was the first to translate Du
Côté de chez Swann into Italian) in which the past is meticulously re-created,
Ginzburg is a miniaturist in her extraordinarily fine command of detail, in the
charged, if distinctly unsentimental way in which she brings the past to heel. It
is a detachment that seems to me a particularly Jewish, particularly Italian detachment,
an ancient, all but visceral fatalism (one can feel the history in it, the
darkness, the weight) cruelly compounded, in the author’s own lifetime, by the
torture and murder, by the Gestapo, of her husband, Leone Ginzburg, and by the
Holocaust itself.
Yet, as is the case with so
many great writers, such brooding forbearance as Ginzburg’s is transmuted—through
the powerful process of her writing—into fiction that transcends her own
experience, so that, while dark, still very dark indeed, it is poignantly, often
luminously so.
Set in Italy between 1939 and
1944, All Our Yesterdays is
essentially a family drama writ small with great precision, then writ large
against the jingoism, murder, and destruction of WWII, a war that steadily creeps
its way toward the family, day by day, mile by mile, even deep into the southernmost
reaches of Italy, where finally it engulfs them in its fury.
The novel’s characters are
sharply, memorably drawn—the housekeeper and de facto mother, Signor Maria; the
wealthy and eccentric “uncle,” Cenzo Rena; the children: Anna, Giustino,
Ippolito, and Concettina; and their sickly, cantankerous father, with his
Goethe and detective novels, exacting his revenge upon the mad and degenerate nation
that is Italy of the time by secretly writing his memoirs: “The old man used to
laugh and rub his hands together at the thought that the King and Mussolini
knew nothing about it, while in a small town in Italy there was a man writing
fiery remarks about them.” It is an image that makes me smile.
Widely considered the most
important woman writer of post-World War II Italy, Natalia Ginzburg is an
author whose works have long been savored by more solitary, world-weary readers
for whom the pace of the telling itself—so patient in Ginzburg’s case—would be
consolation enough. Yet her stories offer
the reader much more than that. To read one of her novels is to surrender oneself
not only to a different tempo but to a different temperament and time. All Our Yesterdays is a deeply affecting
portrait of the trauma and betrayal of war, an experience Europeans of
Ginzburg’s generation knew altogether too well.
*Opening quotation from A Place to Live and Other Selected Essays
by Natalia Ginzburg. Translated by Lynne
Sharon Schwartz and published by Seven Stories Press.
Natalia Ginzburg (1917-1991)was
an Italian-Jewish novelist and playwright who studied in Turin, where she befriended many of the Jewish antifascist
intellectuals active in the Italian resistance. Her first husband, Leone Ginzburg,
a victim of the Nazis, died in a Roman prison in 1944. She was friends with many of Italy’s greatest
writers of the period, including Pier Pasolini, Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante.
and Cesare Pavese. Her best-known books
include Family Sayings, The Little Virtues, The City and the House, The
Manzoni Family, Valentino and
Sagittarius, Family: Family and Borghesia, Two Novellas; and Voices
in the Evening. (Thanks in part to Jewish Virtual
Library)
Peter Adam Nash
No comments:
Post a Comment