Because of her immature urge to be a Russian or some kind of foreign writer, [Natalia Ginzburg's] early work is curiously abstract; the setting is placeless and timeless and the characters have no surnames. As it develops her fiction becomes gradually more specific and personal and the same time less fictitious; she moves from imitations of Chekhov to a fiction that is indistinguishable from autobiography. Yet from the beginning all her narrative is recounted by the same voice. The voice is feminine and fundamentally that of the author, even though it is attributed in the early fiction to narrators very different from Natalia Ginzburg and simultaneously expressive of these characters. The voice plays over and defines the surface of the narrative, and breaking through to this surface, interwoven with it, are the voices of other characters who are soon perceived as recurring from one story to the next, in a kind of modal counterpoint. Almost without exception her writing is about families. There is a recurrent note of ending; families are fragile things, dispersed by war and deteriorating of their own accord through death, through marriage, through the desire of the children for freedom…. She is particularly a specialist on relations between parents and children, on the affections that hold them together and are at the same time balanced by the antagonisms and struggles that hold them apart, and on the complicated, ambivalent, quasi-sexual and yet chaste relations between brother and sister. In her narrative the family is neither a happy nor an unhappy institution. It simply is, and the people in it are sometimes happy and sometimes unhappy. When the narrating voice is happy it is frequently humorous, and when it is unhappy it regards the situation with irony. In place of Italian lamenting or Jewish lamenting there is a kind of French and existentialist pessimism of acceptance. (pp. 87-8)
[A] perky and slightly rebellious stoicism is the ethical thread of all of Natalia Ginzburg's work…. The tribal toughness is assertive and cranky in the male, resilient, intuitive, and conceding in the female. The family is presented totally without sentimentalism. Like a pride of lions they are held together by powerful biological forces, yet each is wary and self-contained, skeptical of the others, ironic of the father's claim to dominance but conceding to power after the first ritual scratches. The family forms through marriage and birth, consolidates, then gradually disintegrates. Commonly the narrator is a semi-spectator in this process; particularly in Valentino, Sagittario, and Lessico familiare she takes only a peripheral part in the drama and her primary function is to record the voices of others. Natalia Ginzburg only reluctantly writes about herself, even in the book that purports to be a kind of autobiography…. Ginzburg has no pretensions to … [Flaubertian] objectivity; with a quite cheerful humility she confines herself to the small scale of her own knowledge and observation. She is a kind of compassionate tape-recorder, and one that filters language so as to allow only a subtly chosen pattern of assonances to arrive at the ear of the listener.
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