Böcker av Natalia Ginzburg

An almost unbearably intimate novella, The Road to the City concentrates on a young woman barely awake to life, who fumbles through her days: she is fickle yet kind, greedy yet abashed, stupidly ambitious yet loving too-she is a mass of confusion. She's in a bleak space, lit with the hard clarity of a Pasolini film. Her family is no help: her father is largely absent; her mother is miserable; her sister's unhappily promiscuous; her brothers are in a separate masculine world. Only her cousin Nini seems to see her. She falls into disgrace and then "marries up," but without any joy, blind to what was beautiful right before her own eyes. The Road to the City was Ginzburg's very first work, originally published under a pseudonym. "I think it might be her best book," her translator Gini Alhadeff remarked: "And apparently she thought so, too, at the end of her life, when assembling a complete anthology of her work for Mondadori.

'It was incredible how fear and danger never produced ignoble words but always true ones, words that were torn from your very heart.'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 aneccentric 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.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, Natalia Ginzburg asks how we can act with integrity when faced with catastrophe, and how we can love well.

Two novellas about friendship, romance, and family by one of the finest Italian writers of the twentieth century.Carmine, an architect, and Ida, a translator, lived together once, long ago, and even had a child, but the child died, and their relationship fell apart, and Carmine married Ninetta, and their child is Dodo, who Carmine feels is a little dull, and these days Carmine is still spending every evening with Ida, but about that Ninetta has nothing to say. Family, the first of these two novellas from the 1970s, is an examination, at first comic, progressively dark, about how time passes and life goes on and people circle round the opportunities they had but missed, missing more as they do, until finally time is up. Borghesia, about a widow who keeps acquiring and losing the Siamese cats she hopes will keep her company in her loneliness, explores similar ground, along with the confusions of feeling and domestic life that came with the loosening social strictures of the seventies. "She remembered saying that there were three things in life you should always refuse", thinks one of Ginzburg's characters, beginning to age out of youth, "Hypocrisy, resignation, and unhappiness. But it was impossible to shield yourself from those three things. Life was full of them and there was no holding them back."

'I took the revolver out of his desk drawer and shot him between the eyes.'Four years before she shoots her husband and walks to a cafe for a coffee, a lonely young woman living in a boarding house meets an older man called Alberto. They go for long walks along the river and on the outskirts of the city; they look like lovers, although they're not.Alberto doesn't tell her anything about himself and she asks few questions. Still, with little else to distract her, she lets her imagination run wild and convinces herself to fall in love. Though he doesn't feel the same, Alberto asks her to marry him and they have a baby. But Alberto is a man who tires quickly of everything.The Dry Heart is a short, dark and psychologically rich novel that forensically examines how an unhappy marriage comes to end in murder.

At the heart of Happiness, as Such is an absence-an abyss that pulls everyone to its brink-created by a family's 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, missing him; so does Mara, his former lover, telling him about the birth of her son who may be his own. Left to clean up Michele's mess, his family and friends complain, commiserate, tease, and grieve, struggling valiantly with the small and large calamities of their interconnected lives.Natalia Ginzburg's most beloved book in Italy and one of her finest achievements, Happiness, as Such is an original, wise, raw, comic novel that cuts to the bone.

Delia is one of five children, growing up in a poor Italian village. She is 17, and dreams of marrying a rich man, living in a grand apartment in the city and wearing silk stockings. To escape her father's neglect and her mother's sadness, she begins to take the dusty road to the city every day, accompanied by Nini,her sweet and mysterious cousin.When Nini takes a job in a factory and moves in with a city woman, Delia sees another way of being. But when she discovers she's pregnant, she agrees to marry the father, seduced by the promise of wealth and comfort.Nothing, not even Nini's desperate declaration of love, can stop her - but her rejection will be his undoing. The Road to the City is a short, poignant novel about the dreamsof youth, and the cruelty it takes to make them come true.

The Complete Short Stories of Natalia Ginzburg encourages a deeper understanding of Ginzburg's life's work and compliments those other collections and individual works which are already widely available in English.

Arguably one of Italy's greatest contemporary writers, Natalia Ginzburg has been best known in America as a writer's writer, quiet beloved of her fellow wordsmiths. This collection of personal essays chosen by the eminent American writer Lynne Sharon Schwartz from four of Ginzburg's books written over the course of Ginzburg's lifetime was a many-years long project for Schwartz. These essays are deeply felt, but also disarmingly accessible. Full of self-doubt and searing insight, Ginzburg is merciless in her attempts to describe herself and her world—and yet paradoxically, her self-deprecating remarks reveal her deeper confidence in her own eye and writing ability, as well as the weight and nuance of her exploration of the conflict between humane values and bureaucratic rigidity.