All Our Yesterdays

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But Concettina had not forgotten the war, and she looked incredulously at the cradle and the coverlet with the mushrooms on it that Signora Maria was embroidering, and she wondered how much longer the baby would sleep in that big cradle of blue taffeta, she already saw herself running away with the baby in her arms amongst tanks and the whistling of sirens, and she hated Signora Maria with her mushrooms and her futile chatter. We are also introduced to the rather colourful character Cenzo Rena, an older friend of the family rumoured to be rich with his own house and estate in Italy’s rural south. The texture of the story is of domestic life – friendships rising and falling; a pregnancy; a marriage of convenience – but all the while the war is beginning to darken the blue skies.

One family is rich (they own the leather factory in town), and the family next door is middle class. It's the 1930s, the fascists of Mussolini are in power, a new war is casting its shadow, but Ginzburg focuses almost entirely on the banal vicissitudes of four youngsters from those families (with a few secondary figures next to them). This is strange: Ginzburg has ventured an experiment with only antiheroes, a family chronicle without passion or fireworks.As the novel unfolds, Anna – the youngest daughter in the middle-class family – gradually emerges as the main protagonist, an ordinary, impressionable teenager alert to developments around her. Pastojusi išsikelia iš gimtųjų namų ir pradeda dar keistesnį gyevnimą, karo baisumams jau įsisiautėjus. But even now the style remains sober and business-like, in a continuous stream of relatively short sentences, descriptive, without dialogues, and again with subdued emotion; not even when really dramatic things happen towards the end of the war. Pero acabó conquistandome, quedé enamorada de Cenzo Rena, generoso y exagerado y de Anna, que soñaba con la revolución, de giuma, ipolito, de todos, así que, aunque el tono no haya cambiado, me encantó. Most of her works were also translated into English and published in the United Kingdom and United States.

her words seemed to express something completely true about my experience of living, and about life. By the war’s end, Natalia was in her late twenties, a widow with three young children and a debut novella under her belt. mesa o pai esfregava as mãos e dizia que se houvesse Deus o deixaria viver até ao fim do fascismo, para poder publicar o seu livro e ver as caras das pessoas. The book focuses on two Italian families living opposite one another in a small Northern Italian town, with the story opening in the late 1930s during the run-up to war.She wrote novels, short stories and essays, for which she received the Strega Prize and Bagutta Prize. All Our Yesterdays is very much a novel about family, but is told in its entirety with no dialogue, only reported speech. All Our Yesterdays was published seven years after the end of the war, and it is difficult not to hear Ginzburg’s own voice in this passage, sitting and grinding away at her desk, “without either danger or fear”, trying to make sense of what remains. ive been wanting to get into more italian literature in translation ever since reading elena ferrante and natalia ginzburg sounds like the perfect author to explore!

Thus, the spotlight shifts to Cenzo Rena and he becomes the axis around which much of the plot of Part Two revolves. Natalia Ginzburg (née Levi) was an Italian author whose work explored family relationships, politics during and after the Fascist years and World War II, and philosophy. She and her four siblings grew up in Turin in northern Italy, in a secular and intellectually lively home. When I first read Natalia Ginzburg’s work several years ago, I felt as if I was reading something that had been written for me, something that had been written almost inside my own head or heart.

I would like to address myself in particular to other readers who are right now awaiting, whether they know it or not, their first and special meeting with her work. But now she has a child, and has been taken to wait out the war in Cenzo Rena’s home in a remote village.

Over time, a friendship develops between Anna and Emanuele’s younger brother, Giuma, a rather arrogant, insensitive boy who seems more interested in himself than anyone around him. In her 1952 novel All Our Yesterdays, the latest welcome reissue of her work by Daunt Books, there are many, many characters, but each is drawn with beautiful particularity. Y todo esto contado con una enorme calidad literaria que hace de esta novela una lectura muy grata y profunda. man pasirodė per daug kasdienių kaimo reikalų, kurie nebuvo itin įdomūs ar kuom nors pažįstami, per daug pasikartojimo, per mažai kažkokio kitimo. Set against the backdrop of Italy between 1939 to 1944 - the months of anxiety before the country entered the war, through to the tension following the Allied victory - "All Our Yesterdays" follows the lives of two families during the period of great turbulence.

Natalia Ginzburg's husband was tortured and murdered by the Gestapo; she was half Jewish and all her family and friends opposed the fascists. She was alone with Giuma’s face that gave her a stab of pain at her heart, and every day she would be going back with Giuma amongst the bushes on the river bank, every day she would see again that face with the rumpled forelock and the tightly closed eyelids, that face that had lost all trace both of words and of thoughts for her. Thus, in a move that greatly bewilders Anna’s family, Cenzo Rena marries Anna and the couple moves to his house in the village of San Costanza which becomes the central focus of Part Two of the book. This is not the easiest book to read, and yet it is one of the most beautiful storytelling I've encountered in a while.