Natalia Ginzburg
Reviews of Natalia Ginzburg’s Writing
‘It was as if her writing was a very important secret that I had been waiting all my life to discover . . . her words seemed to express something completely true about my experience of living, and about life.’ Sally Rooney
Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like.’ –Rachel Cusk
‘Her prose style is deceptively simple and very complex. Its effect on the reader is both calming and thrilling – that’s not so easy to do.’ – Deborah Levy
‘Filled with shimmering, risky, darting observation.’ – Colm Tóibín
‘I’m utterly entranced by Ginzburg’s style – her mysterious directness, her salutary ability to lay things bare that never feels contrived or cold, only necessary, honest, clear.’ – Maggie Nelson
Writing on Natalia Ginzburg That We Loved:
‘If Ferrante is a friend, Ginzburg is a mentor’: the complex world of Natalia Ginzburg - The Guardian
“In 1941 Cesare Pavese wrote a postcard to the 25-year-old Natalia Ginzburg in the Abruzzi, where she was waiting out the war with her three children: “Dear Natalia, stop having children and write a book that is better than mine.” The result was The Road to the City, published in 1942 under a pseudonym because her husband, Leone Ginzburg (a colleague of Pavese’s at the Einaudi publishing house), was in trouble for his antifascist activities. Thus began a 50-year writing career.”
Rediscovering Natalia Ginzburg: In Ginzburg’s time, Italian literature was still largely a men’s club. So she wanted to write like a man - The New Yorker
“In an early novella by the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg—it has just been reissued by New Directions, as “The Dry Heart” (translated by Frances Frenaye) - the narrator walks into her husband’s study and finds him sketching. He shows her his drawing: “a long, long train with a big cloud of black smoke swirling over it and himself leaning out of a window to wave a handkerchief.” In other words, goodbye. He laughs. She doesn’t. “I took the revolver out of his desk drawer and shot him between the eyes.”
About time! For their entire marriage, four years, she has cowered before him: “I was always worried about my face and body, and when we made love I was afraid he might be bored. Every time I had something to say to him I thought it over to make sure it wasn’t boring.”
On Women: An Exchange - Natalia Ginzburg and Alba de Céspedes- New York Review
“In September 1944, not long after the liberation of Rome, the first issue of Mercurio (“a monthly of politics, arts, sciences”) appeared. The editor was Alba de Céspedes y Bertini, a Cuban-Italian writer whose grandfather led Cuba’s revolt for independence from Spain and then served as its first president. She had newly returned from exile in Bari and Naples, where she had gone to escape the German occupation of Rome. Mercurio, in its years of existence (it did not have a strong financial backer and in 1948 ran out of money), published not only most of the great names in Italian culture and politics—Alberto Moravia, Giorgio Bassani, Sibilla Aleramo, Giacomo Debenedetti—but non-Italians, too, such as Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, and Jean-Paul Sartre.”
The Domestic Disappointments of Natalia Ginzburg By Dustin Illingworth - The Paris Review
“Two of Ginzburg’s books have recently been reissued by New Directions. Both explore the chasm between the intimacy we desire to have and what our bitter experiences have taught us to expect. The Dry Heart, a 1947 novella translated from the Italian by Frances Frenaye, begins with the unnamed narrator’s admission of having killed her husband: “I shot him between the eyes.” What follows is a kind of postmortem on the particulars of their failed relationship. In clear and precise prose, the narrator relates how she, a girl from the hill country, came to the city in pursuit of romance. “When a girl is very much alone and leads a tiresome and monotonous existence,” she explains, “with worn gloves and very little spending money, she may let her imagination run wild and find herself defenseless before all the errors and pitfalls which imagination has devised to deceive her.”
Finding Moments of Calm During a Pandemic: Rereading Natalia Ginzburg’s “Winter in the Abruzzi” for its stern and tender fellowship By Maggie Nelson - The New Yorker
“I don’t feel much like reading these days; who does? Who has the time, with all the kids at home? Or who can concentrate? Yesterday, my reading consisted of “Go, Dog. Go!,” a feat achieved while trying to fathom, or simply to bear, the feeling of delighting in phonetic discovery as I sit on a warm couch next to a person I adore, while so much fear, sorrow, uncertainty, and panic surges outside. An outside that looks like nothing but an empty street, flat—if not radiant—with the new calm.
The feeling led me to pull Natalia Ginzburg down from the shelf; I felt a sudden need to reread “Winter in the Abruzzi,” an essay I consider one of the most perfect and devastating ever written. It’s only five and a half pages; I managed to read it while shepherding my son through another utterly chaotic, thoroughly well-intentioned Zoom class for second graders.”
‘This is a perfect novel’: Sally Rooney on the book that transformed her life - The guardian
“When I first read Natalia Ginzburg’s work several years ago, I felt as if I was reading something that had been written for me, something that had been written almost inside my own head or heart. I was astonished that I had never encountered Ginzburg’s work before: that no one, knowing me, had ever told me about her books. It was as if her writing was a very important secret that I had been waiting all my life to discover. Far more than anything I myself had ever written or even tried to write, her words seemed to express something completely true about my experience of living, and about life itself. This kind of transformative encounter with a book is, for me, very rare, a moment of contact with what seems to be the essence of human existence.”
Listen to a discussion on Valentino & Sagittarius + a reading in Italian & English with Jhumpa Lahiri & Cynthia Zarin for NYRB
Shop Natalia Ginzburg Books
get to know Natalia Ginzburg in a podcast
Publisher Marigold Atkey and journalist Emily Rhodes join us for a discussion of Lessico famigliare, Natalia Ginzburg's novelistic memoir or autobiographical novel, first published in Italy in 1963 and most recently translated by Jenny McPhee as Family Lexicon (Daunt/NYRB). Ginzburg had a long and distinguished career in Italian literature, theatre and politics. This episode explores her fascinating life and asks why her work is finding new readers and admirers in the 21st century, amongst them Rachel Cusk and Sally Rooney. Listen here (skip to 27.17 for the discussion on Natalia Ginzburg)