The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

"Five Short Novels and Other Stories": Partly Joy of Joy | Israel today

2022-05-23T16:11:16.361Z


In her short novels, Ginzburg puts the basic connections between spouses to the test, stripping them of the romantic spark • She traces the roots of unhappiness and engages herself - and readers with her - in asking why people are unable to live happily.


"All happy families are alike, every unhappy family - miserable in its own way," wrote Tolstoy Lev, and it seems that the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg would have stamped his diagnosis without doubt.

When you read a file of five novels ("short novels," the author called them) and five stories by Ginzburg, you encounter a lot of unhappiness and realize that she knows her firsthand.

Ginzburg, who was born to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, testified that her childhood in the shadow of an authoritarian father did not bring her happiness.

The explicit statement - "think that a house, where there are many children, is a happy house, but I could not find anything happy in my house" - she will put in the mouth of one of her characters, but even without her in the short novels winds of disappointment, suffering and sadness, which were A smooth dose even in her adult life.

About a year before her death, Ginzburg admitted that when she tries to make up stories, it fails - her autobiography lurks for her and takes over the plot.

In the years since the publication of The Road to the City, her first novel, published in 1942, when she was with her first husband in exile in a small village far from Rome, Ginzburg has developed a unique, quiet and restrained literary voice, devoid of sentimentality and devoid of any didactic dimension.

Even if she wanted to address weighty issues and criticize her country's way in the 20th century, she did so without calling the child by his name, and instead of talking high-high she preferred to sketch the portrait of society through personal connections, especially family relationships.

In her short novels, Ginzburg puts the basic connections between spouses to the test, stripping them of the romantic spark.

It traces the roots of unhappiness and engages itself - and readers with it - in the question of why people are unable to live happily, what opens up the rifts between them and why they are doomed to commit acts that will shatter their lives to pieces.

Beyond the psychological aspect, her study of unhappiness is rooted in the social reality, as it seemed to her, the eyes of a woman who boasted of a left-wing view and represented in her later years the Communist Party in the Italian Parliament.

In today's view it is difficult not to notice the dogmatic core of Ginzburg's writing, and once we have noticed it - it is difficult to focus on the literary values ​​of her work.

Its novella plots serve the ideological line well.

The protagonist of "Valentino", for example, intends to marry a woman just because she owns property, and his character is so fickle that it is clear that it was created specifically to allow the writer to criticize the bourgeois world from the height of her moral position.

No wonder the relationships formed in the sin of property will lead to a life of misery, Ginzburg hints and forgets that misery is not just the lot of the bourgeoisie or of the villagers who want to become bourgeois, and that happiness is not registered in the names of the poor and needy.

Unsurprisingly, the couple's relationship life will run aground both in the novel "That's How It Happened" and in Ginzburg's other stories.

The ways of misery will be perfected, but in perfect accordance with Tolstoy's words this will not change the result.

In the story "My Husband" Ginzburg from Tolstoy not only lends the point, and corresponds exactly with the plot of "The Devil" by the great Russian writer.

Both preach lofty moral values ​​and criticize the deviation from them, but Tolstoy nonetheless retains the primacy.

"When I wrote 'That's How It Was,'" Ginzburg recalled at the end of her life, "I felt miserable: I had neither the power nor the desire to condemn anyone."

You will find this unhappiness in the length and breadth of "Five Short Novels," and you will not be released from it soon.

Natalia Ginzburg / Five Short Novels and Other Stories;

From Italian: Miron Rapoport, Yonatan Payne, Menachem Perry, Kibbutz Hameuchad, 428 pages

Were we wrong?

Fixed!

If you found an error in the article, we'll be happy for you to share it with us

Source: israelhayom

All life articles on 2022-05-23

You may like

News/Politics 2024-03-14T10:05:32.177Z
News/Politics 2024-03-07T05:16:56.904Z
News/Politics 2024-03-12T14:13:29.999Z

Trends 24h

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.