SOURCE: Wilde-Menozzi, Wallis. “Anchoring Natalia Ginzburg.”¹ Kenyon Review 16, no. 1 (winter 1994): 115-30.

In the following essay, Wilde-Menozzi discusses the defining characteristics of Ginzburg's work.

An actress offered me the tapes of a two-hour interview with Natalia Ginzburg made in April 1991 six months before her death at age seventy-five. The brown, magnetic scrolls unwound a much-mourned presence: Natalia Ginzburg's voice. Robust, weathered and warm, her laughter revealed wisdom. I think I could also hear (perhaps because so many people had mentioned it to me) signs of Ginzburg's mask: pain that had not been given in to.

Apparent in the crunchy bits of verisimilitude is Natalia Ginzburg's fascination: complexity, although she was characterized as simple; disarming openness, while labeled shy; “officially” lazy, although her production belies this. Both Catholic and Jew, a nonideologue who followed her instincts, an independent who was an elected communist MP, a declared nonfeminist although her subject...