Voices covers Ginzburg’s favourite terrain, family life, awkwardly realistic family life and she is working at the height of her style which is a powerful and seducing matter-of-factness. How matter-of-factness can be so seductive, so surprising and real is her great skill, her great achievement as a writer.


Ginzburg, whose husband died under Nazi torture, seems to feel the beauty of the everyday particularly sharply and alongside the kind humour of her half-bitchy, half—affectionate family conversations there is a melancholy realism.

‘«Because after she had lost her voice,» said my mother, «she went practically mad through grief and was treated in a clinic. Once a week a dentist visited the place to see the patients’ teeth, and thus he fell in love with her. She had a very beautiful mouth.»

«You have told this story to me millions of times,» said my father. «Why do you want to bother Tommasino with it, with persons he has never seen and never will see?»

«It serves to make a bit of conversation,» said my mother. Do you want us to sit here all evening gazing into each other’s eyes? One tells stories and talks, someone says one thing, and someone else another.»’ p136

Natalia Ginzburg was born to a liberal Jewish family in Palermo, Sicily and spent her whole life in some of the finest intellectual and literary circles in Italy. One of her friendships was with the celebrated Cesare Pavese, [see Babel Guide to Italian Fiction] a writer whose work still burns brightly today.

Voices In The Evening covers Ginzburg’s favourite terrain, family life, awkwardly realistic family life and she is working at the height of her style, a powerful and seducing matter-of-factness. How matter-of-factness can be so seductive, so surprising and real is her great achievement as a writer.

Ginzburg, whose first husband died at the hands of the Fascists, seems to feel the beauty of everyday living particularly sharply and alongside the kind humour of her half-bitchy, half-affectionate family conversations there is a melancholy realism.

Family Sayings, one of Natalia Ginzburg’s most celebrated works is a family memoir that became a best-seller in 1963. Among other things it reflects her kind of Italian Jewish identity, a sense of the division between the restricted small world of Jews and the wider world of Italian letters, politics and society. Family Sayings, as its title suggests, draws its material from that most Jewish (and Italian) of institutions, the family and a kind of intense, domestic intimacy unknown amongst cooler Northern cultures.

In her book Ginzburg shares with us the soundtrack of the family; its words, sayings, dicta, its repetitive and emotive special language. We are allowed to eavesdrop on the inner workings of a family of anti-Fascist Italian intellectuals of the 1930s; it is an extraordinary experience.

Apart from meeting all the great intellectual figures of political and literary life in Turin between 1925 and 1950 we also hear about the various marriages, the brother who joins the underground resistance to Mussolini’s dictatorship, about Natalia Ginzburg’s father, a Professor of Anatomy kicked out of the university by the Fascists and her own journey into ’restricted exile’, a form of arrest meant to isolate intellectuals and political activists, that she undertook with her husband Leone Ginzburg.

Her later book The Little Virtues, is set in calmer times but this too is an extraordinary work, by an author who has really succeeded in sharing her wry, humane and spirited take on life with the reader. From this collection of eleven short pieces, particularly of note are My Vocation, in which Ginzburg speaks of her life as a writer in terms that will cheer anyone who has genuinely dedicated themselves to a profession or art; the two hilarious, charming sketches of England, England: Eulogy and Lament and La Maison Volpé and Portrait of a Friend, her panegyric to Cesare Pavese.

Although outside the mainstream of her work, the novella of family affairs, The Little Virtues is perhaps Ginzburg’s greatest (and most contemporary) achievement. R K & C C

’"Because after she had lost her voice," said my mother, "she went practically mad through grief and was treated in a clinic. Once a week a dentist visited the place to see the patients’ teeth, and thus he fell in love with her. She had a very beautiful mouth."

"You have told this story to me millions of times," said my father. "Why do you want to bother Tommasino with it, with persons he has never seen and never will see?"

"It serves to make a bit of conversation," said my mother. "Do you want us to sit here all evening gazing into each other’s eyes? One tells stories and talks, someone says one thing, and someone else another."’ (p136 Voices In The Evening)

’I have always wondered why there is such a feeling of desolation in English cafés. Perhaps it comes from their desolate social relationships. Every place where the English gather to chat to one another exudes melancholy. Indeed, nothing in the world is sadder than an English conversation, in which everyone is careful to keep to superficialities and never touch on anything essential. In order not to offend your neighbour, not to violate his privacy — which is sacred — an English conversation revolves around subjects that are extremely boring for everyone concerned, but in which there is no danger.’ (p25 England: Eulogy and Lament in The Little Virtues)