There is little point in saying what happens to Natalia Ginzburg's characters, so haphazard does it appear. Everything happens, and nothing—or nearly nothing. So it has been in all her writing over the past thirty years, memoirs as well as fiction. The style never varies, nor do the characters; nor does the treatment she gives them (though the social world they move in has changed drastically). Birth and death, love, relationships, separations, the large matters of personal life, are given the same amount of space on the page, the same weight in the telling, as the supposed trifles….
Is she a comic writer? Well, Lessico famigliare is one of the most memorably funny books about family life in Italy or anywhere else. Yet sad, too, her characters … doomed to an everlasting melancholy that has little to do with circumstances or even, in a sense, with unhappiness; a sort of low-spiritedness, a sense of fatality, a weather of greyness lit by very occasional moments of tender remembrance and longing, as relationships, mostly unsatisfactory, are lit by impulses of warmth, affection and loyalty directed towards the unlikeliest people. Flicked rather than buffeted not so much by fate as by their own limitations, these people centrally set in a shifting society—always bourgeois, always familiar to their creator, who never strays from the world she knows so well—take on an emblematic character; if only as symbols of the inconsistency of their world and its eternal, eternally altering relationships.
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Read the rest of this Criticism with our Ginzburg, Natalia 1916–: Critical Essay by Isabel Quigly Access Pass.
