After the popularity of Elena
Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, US readers are rediscovering
another Italian novelist, Natalia Ginzburg.
Ginzburg, who died in 1991 at 75, was "celebrated as one of
the great Italian writers", wrote the New York Times this week
after the new publication of two works by the author.
Ginzburg's 1963 autobiographical novel, "Family Lexicon," was
published in a new translation by Jenny McPhee two years ago,
and two other works of fiction, "The Dry Heart" and "Happiness,
as Such," have just been republished, including one in a new
translation.
The 1947 novel "The Dry Heart" in Francis Frenaye's classic
translation from 1949 will be available again as of June 25
while "Happiness, as Such", has just been retranslated with a
new title by Minna Zallman Proctor, editor of the Literary
Review and winner of the PEN Poggioli prize.
The two novels follow by two years the reissue for Anglophone
readers of Ginzburg's autobiographical masterpiece "Family
Lexicon" with an introduction by Tim Parks.
Meanwhile in Britain Daunt Books last year reissued "The
Little Virtues" from 1962 and "Voices in the Evening" in
February.
The Guardian's literary critic Lara Feigel said reading
Ginzburg is a "bit like reading Ferrante, but where reading
Ferrante can seem like making a new friend, reading Ginzburg is
more like finding a mentor".
The New York Times had already paid homage to Ginzburg with
an obituary penned by William H. Honan in 1991 in which he said
that the novelist was "once dismissed as a minor writer because
of her preoccupation with family life".
One year earlier, Ginzburg had told American novelist Mary
Gordon that she wrote about families because "everything starts
there".
The rediscovery of her work has been slow but constant:
"There is something of Beckett in Ginzburg's prose; of Chekhov,
whom she greatly admired; and of Shakespeare's late plays, in
which tragedy most often occurs offstage. It is one of life's
mysteries that what makes tragedy both bearable and unbearable
is the same thing-that life goes on", poet Cynthia Zarin wrote
in 2017 in an article published by the New Yorker.
One year later, novelist Rachel Cusk said Ginzburg "gave us a
new model for the female voice".
Now, for the New York Times's Parul Sehgal, this voice "is
instantly, almost violently recognizable - aloof, amused and
melancholy".
"Where does style come from? Is it knowingly constructed or
unconsciously secreted? Invented or inherited? These questions
dog me whenever I read Ginzburg, whose thumbprint is so
unmistakable, so inscribed by her time", wrote Sehgal, yet so
universal "that it requires no background information to
appreciate".
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