SOURCE: Goldensohn, Lorrie. “Natalia Ginzburg: The Days and Houses of Her Art.” Salmagundi, no. 96 (fall 1992): 96-129.

In the following essay, Goldensohn traces the thematic and stylistic development of Ginzburg's work.

Natalia Ginzburg published her first novel at 26 in 1944, her last in 1985. Her books, including a memoir and collections of essays, embrace a succession of crowded decades that stretch from fascist Italy to postwar anomie. Politics and history suffuse a work that often turns its face away from overt political analysis: “My political thinking is pretty rough and tangled, elementary and confused,” she once said. At the near edges of her writing on the postwar period, glinting once or twice in a novel, a saturated political object like a flag or a black shirt or a Roman salute emerges occasionally, is impersonally inspected, and held up to the passing daylight like an object from an archaeological dig. In the...