Natalia Ginzburg

Sagittario apparve nel 1957 insieme a un altro romanzo breve che dava il titolo al volume, Valentino. Il tono è apparentemente svagato, da commedia, ma il fascino della narrativa della Ginzburg sta proprio nella segreta rispondenza fra la finta svagatezza dei suoi personaggi e la pena che si chiudono in cuore. Una trepida, sorridente malinconia vela l'ironia divertita con cui la scrittrice disegna un indimenticabile ritratto di madre.

Beknopte biografie van de Russische schrijver (1860-1904).

"Natalia Ginzburg, one of Italy's great writers, introduced A Family Lexicon, her most celebrated work, with an unusual disclaimer: "The places, events and people are all real. I have invented nothing. Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt impelled at once to destroy everything thus invented." A Family Lexicon re-creates with extraordinary objectivity the small world of a family enduring some of the most difficult years of the twentieth century, the period from the rise of Mussolini through World War II (Ginzburg's first husband, who was a member of the resistance, was killed by the Nazis) and its immediate aftermath. Every family has its store of phrases and sayings by which it maintains its sense of what it means to be a family. Such sayings and stories lie at the heart of a great novel about family and history"--

"Natalia Ginzburg, arguably the most important woman writer of postwar Italy, always spoke of herself with irrepressible modesty. Yet the woman who claimed she "never managed to climb up mountains" in fact wrote the history of twentieth-century Italy with her sparse and captivating prose, chronicling Fascism, war, and the Nazi occupation as well as the intimacies of family life." "Ginzburg's marriage to Leone Ginzburg, who met his death at the hands of the Nazis for his anti-fascist activities, and her work for the Einaudi publishing house placed her squarely in the center of Italian political and cultural life. But whether writing about the Turin of her childhood, the Abruzzi countryside where her family was interned during World War II, or contemporary Rome, Ginzburg never shied away from the traumas of history - even if she approached them only indirectly, through the mundane details and catastrophes of personal life."--Jacket.

"The Road to the City" and "The Dry Heart." Each is narrated by a young woman who is in some way betrayed by, or the betrayer of, romantic love. In her inimitable, spare, and understated style, Ginzburg--the minimalist--manages to express extraordinary passions, disappointments, and truths of the heart. With a masterful understanding of the human, and particularly female, psyche, Ginzburg turns her meticulous and understated tales into rich, funny, profound, and psychologically gripping landscapes of the human heart.

96 p. ; 20 cm

"The hauntingly beautiful epistolary novel from 'a glowing light of modern Italian literature' (New York Times Book Review). At the heart of Happiness As Such is an absence, an abyss that draws everyone nearer to its edge, created by the departure of a family's wayward only son, Michele, who has fled from Italy to England to escape the dangers and threats of his radical political ties. This novel is part epistolary: his mother writes letters to him, nagging him; his sister Angelica writes to him too; so does Mara, his former lover, who gave birth to a child who could be his own. Left to clean up Michele's mess, his family and friends complain and commiserate, making mistakes and missteps, attempting to cope in the only ways that they know how. With a few brushstrokes, Natalia Ginzburg can flesh out an entire existence and all its pitfalls and disappointments with unmatched clarity. One of Natalia Ginzburg's finest achievements, Happiness As Such is an experimental, wise, raw, comic novel, written in powerful prose that cuts to the bone with surgical precision"--

"Finally back in print, a frighteningly lucid feminist horror story about marriage The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement, 'I shot him between the eyes.' Everything in between is a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness, and as the tale proceeds, the narrator's murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. In this powerful novella, Natalia Ginzburg's writing is white-hot, fueled by rage, stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality; she transforms an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that might pose the question: Why don't more wives kill their husbands?"--

224 p. ; 23 cm