★ 03/22/2021
Ginzburg (Family Lexicon ) takes a close look at the effects of fascism on an Italian family in this engrossing novel first published in 1961 and reissued with an introduction by Colm Tóibín, who sheds light on Ginzburg’s interest in her characters’ “competing versions of reality.” The wealthy De Franciscis reside at a rural estate during the years before and immediately after WWII. Patriarch Balotta, a socialist factory owner, is by turns boisterous and withdrawn, while his wife, Cecilia, maintains a close watch of the community’s gossip. The story is told by Elsa, a young woman who has an ill-fated love affair with the De Francisci’s youngest son, Tommasino. Ginzburg (1916–1991) dedicates several chapters to each of the De Francisi children: Gemmina, the oldest, becomes stern and mercurial after her unrequited love interest is killed by a fascist gang; the elder sons, Vincenzino and Mario, spend time as prisoners of war, which costs Mario his life and leads Vincenzino to fall into a loveless marriage; and Raffaella, the youngest daughter, joins the partisans before marrying her ex-fascist cousin. Ginzburg’s efficient, lyrical prose and ear for dialogue make for an expansive and beautifully rendered study of individuals and community in wartime. With this latest resurrected masterpiece, the late author’s work continues to prove irresistible and relevant. (May)
"There is perhaps no greater archivist of the family lexicon than the Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg."
Jewish Currents - Jess Bergman
"The concepts, emotions and characters in her books are complex and unforgettable."
New York Times - Laurie Anderson
"Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like."
"Her sentences have great precision and clarity, and I learn a lot when I read her."
"Ginzburg is a miniaturist. Her themes are buried in gestures, fragments, absences—not in what is said, but in what is not said....When there are glimpses of happiness in Ginzburg’s work, they take root in unlikely places, outside the narrow confines of convention. Voices in the Evening , set in the period immediately after the war, is a portrait of the children of a factory boss as told by Elsa, the factory accountant’s daughter, a typically opaque Ginzburgian narrator. Elsa is having a covert love affair with Tommasino, the youngest of the boss’s children, and the pair meet every Wednesday in a modest rented room. Ginzburg sketches the parameters of their relationship with typical precision, through an accretion of specifics that accumulate incredible force, humor, and beauty."
"I’m utterly entranced by Ginzburg’s style – her mysterious directness, her salutary ability to lay things bare that never feels contrived or cold, only necessary, honest, clear."
"Sharp and lively."
"Though the political context is important in understanding the nuances of her work, Ginzburg’s talent, and how fresh these stories still feel, is in her note-perfect characterizations. The many political frictions offer a context, but it’s these imaginary/real people who are front and center."
Chicago Review of Books - Mandana Chaffa
★ 2021-03-17
In this short but very affecting novel, originally published in English in 1963, characters speak of trivialities. “What a fine head of hair he has, at that age!” Elsa’s mother tells her as, walking home, they pass a neighbor. “Did you notice how ugly the dog has become?” Neither Elsa’s mother nor anyone else in their small Italian village knows that Elsa has fallen in love with Tommasino, the youngest child of Balotta, the old factory owner. The book takes a looser structure than Ginzburg’s others. Elsa and Tommasino bookend the story with their affair, but the middle is taken up by an account of Tommasino’s siblings and their spouses: Purillo, the adopted cousin who takes over their father’s factory; long-faced Gemmina; dreamy Vincenzino; and Mario, who marries Xenia, a Russian who speaks French but no Italian and so cannot converse with anyone in the village. What all these lives have to do with one another doesn’t become clear until the end. What is clear is that there is a darker current running beneath all the trivialities. During the war, Purillo sympathized with the fascists, an affectation for which the others mocked him. Nebbia, a friend, was killed behind the house. “I have the feeling,” Tommasino tells Elsa near the end, “that they have already lived enough, those others before me; that they have already consumed all the reserves, all the vitality that there was for us….Nothing was left over for me.” Rarely does Ginzburg directly address politics—fascism, in particular—but its shadow hangs over the book just like it hangs over the characters. The result is profound and profoundly moving.
As deceptively diffuse as it is meticulously observed, Ginzburg’s novel is a gem.
In another of the understated, richly evocative novels for which she is known, Ginzburg takes us into an Italian village whose almost claustrophobic atmosphere reflects its residents' entanglements as they cope in various ways with the creeping changes in lifestyle brought about by fascism and by modernization. At the center of this elegant, spare novel, translated with apparent seamlessness, is a doomed, yet not sad, love affair. Elsa, romantic and introspective, and Tommasino, son of the family whose aging factory dominates the town, a man who combines ``linear programming'' with Byronesque angst, conduct an affair that while not greatly passionate, has yet its own fulfillment. The lovers, who do not meet in their own village, where society and family (a ``trail of relations like a long snake'') entrap them, agree to avoid marriage. Aptly titled, the novel captures the intergenerational stories told and re-told in quiet evening conversations. (Oct.)
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
As if carried on a warm and gentle breeze, Ginzburg's voices come to us from their Italian hill town in the strange hush that followed World War II. They belong to narrator Elsa; Elsa's mother, who worries about her health and her children--particularly Elsa, who is 27 and still unmarried; old Balota, a Socialist who owned the cloth factory; and Balota's wife and five children, including Tommasino, with whom Elsa has had a too-long and unsatisfying affair. In her Author's Note, Ginzburg declares: ``The places and characters in this story are imaginary. The first are not found on any map, the others are not alive, nor have ever lived, in any part of the world. I am sorry to say this, having loved them as though they were real.'' With obvious affection and meticulous care, with her usual stylistic elegance and literary economy, the author has indeed made them real for us, as well. Highly recommended.-- Marcia G. Fuchs, Guilford Free Lib., Ct.
