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All Our Yesterdays

All Our Yesterdays

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They are soon joined by Danilo, a suitor of Anna’s sister Concettina, and the three young men take to shutting themselves up in the sitting room together, talking. Set in a smaller town in Italy before and during the Second World War, Natalia Ginzburg’s All Our Yesterdays is simply wonderful; a big-hearted, bustling novel of family, friendships, politics, and war pitted against a backdrop of immense turbulence, and narrated in a style that captures Ginzburg’s customary dry wit. Ginzburg thus provides us with a simple explanation for the book’s title – these yesterdays belong to this group of friends.

The narrator often leads us away from her without warning, relating events to which she is not a witness, describing with sudden compassion the thoughts and feelings of other, seemingly minor figures, their desires, disappointments and dreams. 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! He [Cenzo Rena] looked out of the window at the refugees from Naples who were now going hither and thither about the lanes of the village, carrying mattresses and babies, he looked and said how sad it was to see all these mattresses carried about here and there all over Italy, Italy was now pouring mattresses out of her ravaged houses. The culmination of war brings great relief and joy to the surviving characters, normal life can finally resume but will it ever be the same? Unlike the unfortunate Signora Maria, my grandmother, and her mother and father, did make it down to the air-raid shelter in time, but had no indication that they’d lost their home until they came out of the shelter the next morning – ‘you never hear the one that hits you’, was my grandmother’s refrain for the rest of her life.

No, I haven’t read Family Lexicon yet, but it’s great to hear that you rate it so highly as I definitely want to get to it. Anna, Censo Rena, Ippolito, a senhora Maria, Emilio, Giustino, Giuma e Maschioma são apenas algumas das personagens desta obra que me prendeu do princípio ao fim, numa ânsia de saber mais, de conhecer o desfecho de cada cena, de ver quem morria e quem vivia, quem se transformava ou nem por isso. But I guess I’ve homed in on Anna because she features quite heavily in part two where we follow her move to the South and her marriage to Cenzo Rena. Once again, the juxtaposition between the micro-level tensions of family life and the broader drama of world events is highly compelling, underscoring the radical sociopolitical changes unfolding across the country at the time. Despite her family’s objections, Anna marries Cenzo Rena and moves to his house in the South, a strange collection of large, sparsely-furnished rooms adorned by the myriad of useless objects he has amassed from his travels abroad.

That’s the most ‘major-league’ of Ginzburg’s works that I’ve read so far, and I think widely recognised as her masterpiece, or at least one of them. 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”. 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.I was astonished that I had never encountered Ginzburg’s work before: that no one, knowing me, had ever told me about her books. As Germany steadily begins invading countries beginning with Poland and moving westwards, Emanuele et al are wracked with tension, and the fall of France is the final straw precipitating Ippolito’s descent into a crippling depression. But it is also a story about the possibility of knowing what is right, and living by that knowledge, whatever the consequences. The novel’s network of romantic entanglements is suitably complex but relatable – a delight to observe!

Porque na Polónia morria gente, todos os dias morria gente de um lado e do outro, enquanto ele e Emanuele estavam sentados a falar no terraço e a senhora Maria procurava açúcar pela cidade. This is strange: Ginzburg has ventured an experiment with only antiheroes, a family chronicle without passion or fireworks. I’ve read a lot of translations of Italian novels set during the war and it seems to me this is the perfect book to learn what life was like in Italy during WW II. One family is rich (they own the leather factory in town), and the family next door is middle class. Shy and reserved in nature, Anna’s very young age and reticent demeanour mean that she is hardly noticed in the house, but she notices various aspects of her family the significance of which she does not always comprehend.Los tiempos son difíciles: el período en que el nazismo avanzaba sobre el continente bajo la indiferencia de Italia (y de Anna, aunque no de varios de sus allegados), el período en que la guerra se trasladó a Italia, y en la última etapa, la postguerra. Then War suddenly brakes out, her brother Ippolito ends up shooting himself, and in time of dread she is rescued from her plight by Cenzo Rena, an extravagant and eccentric friend of her father’s who turns up out of the blue and offers to marry her.



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