All Our Yesterdays

Product Information

Considered among the best writers in contemporary Italy, Ginzburg should appeal to a wide American audience with this collection of essays."— Publishers Weekly Voices in the Evening begins with the narrator and her mother walking homewards through their Italian mountain village one evening in autumn. The final chapter repeats that journey one year later. Anna, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl in a small town in northern Italy, finds herself pregnant after a brief romance. To save her reputation, she marries an eccentric older family friend, Cenzo Rena, and they move to his village in the south. Their relationship is touched by tragedy and grace as the events of their life in the countryside run parallel to the war and the encroaching threat of fascism – and in their wake, a society dealing with anxiety and grief. E nonostante il chiacchiericcio imperi - più in ambito femminile che maschile - questa è soprattutto una storia di silenzi, di pensieri sotterrati, di gente che volta le spalle alla propria anima.

Mostly though, the relationships that develop between the book’s characters are strained. This applies between parents and children, siblings, and married couples. Many of them seem to have a sense of the village as an oppressive place, where they are forced to conform to the expectations of family and society, rather than follow their own wishes. The characters have a tendency to be brutally honest with each other.Yet, despite this confidence and optimism, the ravages of the war remained with my grandparents their entire lives – and the impact was felt by their children and grandchildren. At my maternal grandparents’ ruby wedding in 1981, when I was eleven years old, my grandfather gave a speech in which he mentioned the people who could not be with us to celebrate. Among these were a series of names I didn’t recognise, and neither did any of those present. They were his dead war comrades. To this day I can’t be sure when or how they died – he refused to discuss it, just as he refused to take part in any form of remembrance ceremony. He remembered in his way, he insisted. This was his grief. On completing All Our Yesterdays, however, I was prompted to offer quite a different response – both from the one I anticipated, and from my usual style of review. My starting point was Ginzburg’s title: All Our Yesterdays is a direct translation of her ‘Tutti I Nostri Ieri’. This is a novel about the rise of fascism and the Second World War as experienced by a bourgeois family and their wealthy friends and neighbours living in a small town in northern Italy. Having been scattered across the country, and Europe, by the upheaval of war, the final scene sees the survivors regather and reflect on the recent past – ‘thinking of all those who were dead, and of the long war and the sorrow and noise and confusion’. Ginzburg thus provides us with a simple explanation for the book’s title – these yesterdays belong to this group of friends. But simplicity in Ginzburg is deceiving. In 1952, when the book was first published, many Italian readers must have thought that ‘ nostri’ included them. For Ginzburg’s cast draws in characters from across the social spectrum, from factory owners to police sergeants, from ladies’ companions to lowly servants, and from the aristocratic Marchesa to the Italian peasants, the contandini – all with both a collective and a personal experience of the war; Ginzburg, as always, creating a satisfying tension between the general and the specific. From “one of the most distinguished writers of modern Italy” ( New York Review of Books), a classic novel of society in the midst of a war. During the period described in the novel, Natalia Ginzburg was married to the writer Leone Ginzburg. Because of his underground activities, he was interned under Mussolini’s reign, along with his family, in a restricted area in the Abruzzi. When the Ginzburgs later moved to Rome, Leone was arrested and tortured by the fascists, and killed, leaving Natalia alone to raise her three children. It is Elsa’s voice, speaking in resignation, not joy, that should end this review, and it left me with mixed feeings, as it may you. Ginzburg's spare, deceptively simple style speaks volumes.

When we are happy our imagination is stronger; when we are unhappy our memory works with greater vitality. Suffering makes the imagination weak and lazy. A particular sympathy grows up between us and the characters we invent—that our debilitated imagination is still just able to invent—a sympathy that is tender and almost maternal, warm and damp with tears, intimately physical and stifling. We are deeply, painfully rooted in every being and thing in the world, the world which has become filled with echoes and trembling and shadows, to which we are bound by a devout and passionate pity. Then we risk foundering on a dark lake of stagnant, dead water, and dragging our mind’s creations down with us, so that they are left to perish among dead rats and rotting flowers in a dark, warm whirlpool. He could produce secret newspapers but not newspapers that were not secret, producing secret newspapers was easy, oh, how easy and how splendid it was. But newspapers that had to come out every day with the rising of the sun, without any danger or fear, that was another story. You had to sit and grind away at a desk, without either danger or fear, and out came a lot of ignoble words and you knew perfectly well that they were ignoble and you hated yourself like hell for having written them but you didn’t cross them out because there was a hurry to get out the newspaper for which people were waiting. But it was incredible how fear and danger never produced ignoble words but always true ones, words that were torn from your very heart.

Wikipedia citation

Ginzburg’s experiences of the war, and the experiences of her characters, differ in a key way from my family’s, of course. My family were on the winning side. The war effort pursued in the armed forces by my maternal grandfather, and in the civil service by my paternal grandfather – a quaker, and therefore a ‘conchie’, or conscientious objector – and by both my grandmothers, who each had to sign the Official Secrets Act to perform their roles, was against a combination of an ideology and a group of nations in the form of the Axis powers. For Ginzburg and her characters, though, ideology and nationality are separate: the fascists do not represent Italy for them, and when the Germans sweep in they are treated like an invading force, not friendly partners. Indeed the English, when they finally arrive, remind the Italians of the Germans: ‘The contandini … stood spellbound looking at these soldiers dressed like the Germans in yellowish cloth with short trousers and blond, hairy knees.’ However, ‘the contandini were very pleased indeed with these new soldiers who did not kill them’. If Braun seems to have no regret about the horrors he enacted, he is at least traumatised by the deaths of his wife and child, who were killed in Operation Gomorrah, the allied bombing of Hamburg in July 1943. His mental equilibrium begins to be overturned: he finds he is the No 1 target for the German authorities, becomes more and more paranoid about informers, distrusts his lover and finally decides to flee to the safety of Argentina.

If you enjoy novels where the true story appears sparingly in dialogue, this short Ginzburg novel is the one for you. Ginzburg was politically involved throughout her life as an activist and polemicist. Like many prominent anti-Fascists, for a time she belonged to the Italian Communist Party. She was elected to the Italian Parliament as an Independent in 1983. These are characters from whom the war has taken a great deal, almost everything. But the challenge that faces them in the end is to make sense of a world that is no longer at war, a world in which heroic acts of courage are no longer necessary or even possible, a world in which newspapers have to “come out every day with the rising of the sun”. 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. Although Natalia Ginzburg was able to live relatively free of harassment during World War II, her husband Leone was sent into internal exile because of his anti-Fascist activities, assigned from 1941–1943 to a village in Abruzzo. She and their children lived most of the time with him. [5] At the cemetery Signora Maria would pray, but the two children did not, because their father always said it was silly to pray, and perhaps God might exist but it was no use praying to Him, He was God and knew of His own accord how matters stood.

My Book Notes

Now I know why I got this book! Because of JacquiWine’s review (3rd review below). But I would recommend you read her review after you read the book...I feel there’s a fair amount of spoiler alert passages in her review. But it’s good! At the heart of the novel is a concern with experiences that both deepen and deaden existence: adultery and air raids, neighbourhood quarrels and bombings. With her signature clear-eyed wit, Ginzburg asks how we can act with integrity when faced with catastrophe, and how we can love well. Even the one older girl who is most attractive and has boys waiting outside the gate for her to come out (her father won’t let them in the house) is too small in her bosom and too big in her hips and thighs. Others are too short, head too small, or otherwise misshapen.