SOURCE: Pastore, Judith Laurence. “The Sounds of Silence: The Absence of Narrative Presence in Natalia Ginzburg's La cittá e la casa.” Italian Culture 11 (1993): 311-22.

In the following essay, Pastore discusses Ginzburg's use of a narrative absence approach in her fiction, especially in La cittá e la casa.

Natalia Ginzburg has done well to “rely on her own ear for the dramatic transcript of a language within which resides the secret of her narrative powers and beneath which one senses the presence of something unsaid.”

—Raul Radice

Masterpiece Theatre's adaptation of Samuel Richardson's one-million-word, nine-volume epistolary novel Clarissa (1747-8)—the longest in the English language—into a three-part television series may generate renewed interest in this seldom read classic. But it probably does not herald a widespread revival of a writing technique which took literate Europe by storm in the second half of the eighteenth century. “Writing to the...