Two novellas about domestic life, isolation, and the passing of time by one of the finest Italian writers of the twentieth century.
Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) was born Natalia Levi in Sicily, the
daughter of a Jewish biologist father and a Catholic mother. She
grew up in Turin, in a household that was a salon for antifascist
activists, intellectuals, and artists, and published her first
short stories at the age of eighteen; she would go on to become one
of the most important and widely taught writers in Italy, taking up
the themes of oppression, family, and social change. In 1938, she
married Leone Ginzburg, a prominent writer, activist, and editor.
In 1940, the fascist government exiled the Ginzburgs and their
children to a remote village. After the fall of Mussolini, Leone
fled to Rome, where he was arrested by Nazi authorities and
tortured to death. Natalia married Gabriele Baldini, an English
professor, in 1950, and spent the next three decades in Rome,
London, and Turin, writing dozens of novels, plays, and essay. NYRB
Classics is the publisher of her novelFamily Lexiconand two
novellas,Valentino and Sagittarius.
Beryl Stockman is a translator, poet, and professional psychic and
Tarot reader. She lives in London.
Eric Gudas is the author ofBest Western and Other Poems.His work
has appeared inThe American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry
Flash, Raritan, and elsewhere.
“A glowing light of modern Italian literature . . . Ginzburg’s
magic is the utter simplicity of her prose, suddenly illuminated by
one word that makes a lightning stroke of a plain phrase . . . As
direct and clean as if it were carved in stone, it yet speaks
thoughts of the heart.” —Kate Simon, The New York Times
“The raw beauty of Ginzburg’s prose compels our gaze. First we look
inward, with the shock of recognition inspired by all great
writing, and then, inevitably, out at the shared world she evokes
with such uncompromising clarity.” —Hilma Wolitzer
“There is no one quite like Ginzburg for telling it like it is. Her
unique, immediately recognizable voice is at once clear and shaded,
artless and sly, able to speak of the deepest sorrows and smallest
pleasures of everyday life.” —Phillip Lopate
“[Ginzburg’s] stories have a subtle power that catches you at the
end. . . each sings with the characteristic wit and piercing
clarity of prose that holds you rapt when you read her work.”
—Lauren Kane, The Paris Review Daily
“Lucid, witty, and heartbreaking. . . [Family is] a superb,
unforgettable feast. . . . These two novellas are suffused with the
rigorous wisdom Ginzburg earned through calamity and her
determination to persist nonetheless in her work.” —Lynne Sharon
Schwartz, The Los Angeles Review of Books
“There is perhaps no greater archivist of the family lexicon than
the Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg. . . She believed that the
words and stories ‘heard and repeated countless times’ in childhood
constituted a ‘dictionary of our past’—and, at least in her case,
created the conditions for ‘family unity.’ . . . [Ginzburg]
reflects the unvarnished way that close relatives really
communicate.” —Jess Bergman, Jewish Currents
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