Familias

by Natalia Ginzburg

Un retrat meravellós de les realitats familiars del segle XX Família i Burgesia són els dos relats llargs que formen aquest llibre que Natalia Ginzburg va escriure el 1977. En ells, l’autora es submergeix en un territori molt el de les crisis familiars i els destins dibuixats per la fortuna, la desgràcia, casualitats capricioses i trobades inesperades, amors fràgils i aversions obstinades. Natalia Ginzburg segueix els arabescos d’aquestes vides imperfectes amb un estil depurat i líric, caracteritzat per la subtilesa, en un contrapunt submís però implacable que reinventa la música banal i terrible de la vida. Un cop més, Ginzburg demostra uns dots d’observació superbs i molt poc habituals. En la recerca deliberada de les coses petites hi trobem la grandesa de la seva literatura.

Genres: Fiction, Italian Literature, Italy, Classics, Novella, Short Stories, 20th Century

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Natalia Ginzburg (née Levi) was an Italian author whose work explored family relationships, politics during and after the Fascist years and World War II, and philosophy. She wrote novels, short stories and essays, for which she received the Strega Prize and Bagutta Prize. Most of her works were also translated into English and published in the United Kingdom and United States. An activist, for a time in the 1930s she belonged to the Italian Communist Party. In 1983 she was elected to Parliament from Rome as an Independent.

Reviews

[Carolyn Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

These stories explore the complexities of love, family, and relationships, which (as someone who finds strong characters and deep emotions very interesting) I thoroughly enjoyed.

Natalia Ginzburg’s writing felt fresh and vivid. The characters in these two novellas were full of life and passion.

I look forward to reading her other work!

[Baz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ginzburg’s a favourite I’ve read and written about before, not long ago, and I loved these two works for the same reasons I’ve loved the others, so I ain’t gonna say much.

I had a brief exchange in a DM with someone, and I’m stealing his descriptors for Ginzburg. He said ‘piercing’ and he said ‘diamond-cutter brain’. And I thought that was just perfect. She throws into sharp relief, in her distinct tightly compressed way, experiences, dynamics and emotions that are incredibly complicated—diamond-cutter brain. Her stories make me feel the weight of the heart in my chest—piercing.

She has this deceptively simple delivery and incredibly clear voice – it feels artless but is so bloody artful. I don’t know how she does it, but I’m in thrall to her power.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe it's not about the haunting specter of aging and death but the cats we adopt along the way.

[Michela De Bartolo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fin dalle prime pagine ci rendiamo conto di essere immersi in una narrazione frammentaria, che si compone di accadimenti modesti e discontinui, registrati quasi con oggettività, e di dettagli sparsi e apparentemente banali, un cappotto malridotto, una frangia nera, una brutta lampada di carta. Piccoli gesti e particolari che compongono un vissuto grigio e desolante. Non c'è nemmeno una dimensione psicologica: i rapporti umani non sono analizzati, i sentimenti non vengono confessati e non ci sono le motivazioni di certe azioni. Tutta la storia si fonda sulle relazioni tra i personaggi che però sembrano interagire mossi non dalla propria forza di volontà ma da qualcosa di simile all'inerzia, che li trascina in un mondo di ipocrisia, rassegnazione e infelicità.
Purtroppo questo modo di raccontare non mi ha trascinato nella lettura e non mi è piaciuta particolarmente. Che la scrittrice abbia usato questo metodo per avvalorare con più forza il disgregarsi della famiglia borghese italiana, lo sfacelo dei legami tradizionali e l’incapacità di affrontare i sentimenti che caratterizza un’intera generazione ?

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Family is the book that Jonathan Franzen probably wishes he was writing when he was writing Freedom. This is my first Ginzburg novel (or rather, novellas - there are two)and I would like to refrain from making general statements about the rest of her oeuvre, but will anyway: Ginzburg's project, it seems, is in describing the personal and spiritual isolation of modern life and the dissolution of the family unit as people find other alternatives out of desire or necessity.

Ginzburg's prose [as presented by her translator] is sparse and descriptive and seems not much at first reading. I thought a lot about B.R. Myer's A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose while reading Family. He makes a point in his manifesto about the tyranny of the sentence in modern writing; how the best compliment a critic can give an author nowadays is that she/he can write a beautiful sentence. This led me to think about the point that Myers and others have made that this tyranny of the beautiful sentence has crushed the novel and story as art forms. As a result, they have lost their bounded-ness of late and become leaky globular things whose meaning is hard to pin down . . . (and now I am reminded of this brilliant
Maud Newton piece in the New York Times on this very phenomenon).

I counted one beautiful sentence, in "Borghesia". I didn't set out to count it but it was so obvious, surrounded as it was by its homely siblings, that I couldn't help but notice it. It wasn't even that beautiful - it just stood out by comparison. Not much else jumped out at me while reading these two novellas about the Roman middle-class until the end of each when it occured to me that what I had just finished was something with form and symmetry - things that the contemporary novel, with its focus on the beautiful sentence, has completely forgotten about. For all of the disorder in these characters lives their stories unfold in ordered ways.

Family is the story of two former lovers who, once their relationship is over, find in each other the stability they lacked while they were in love and takes the form of a circle, starting and finishing with a trip to the movies. Borghesia, perhaps the lesser of the two in the scope of its exploration of petit bourgeois existence, but my favorite all the same, tells the story of a woman, Ilaria, and her family, who are constantly bitten by small tragedies. The story itself is like the path of a drafter's compass in the way that it pivots around a central focus of Ilaria's adoption of a succession of cats. It is wonderful.

To finish, give me form and symmetry and stories that are beautiful in their wholeness and save your bloody beautiful sentences for a t-shirt.

[Misha · Rating 5 out of 5]

My seventh Ginzburg and everything I have said before remains true here. Natalia Ginzburg is a quiet murderer. Your heart feels tight and in tatters, you don't even realise it because she does it so subtly. Dramatic plotting or intricate flourishes in writing are not Ginzburg's style. It's the way her dialogues capture that something ordinary and everyday in the way people interact. It's the way there is so much simple beauty in her descriptions of people, homes, streets, just the act of living.

There is nothing extraordinary about her characters. They are pathetic like the rest of us. Trying to survive the utter dreariness of living. Birth and death. And everything in-between - families not especially dysfunctional or especially functional, parenthood, love, separations, financial problems, friendships lost and found, ambitions lost and found, neighbourhood gossip, sicknesses, secret sadnesses. How fleeting things can be. They pass and you later realise that something meant something more and that something was good. Memories that well up sometimes uncomfortably. Messy messy, not even a stylish or an aesthetic mess.

Maybe Ginzburg's books feel so life-affirming because she elevates the ordinary into something meaningful.

[Samuel Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

My very first time reading Ginzburg. Color me impressed. These two short novellas were very well written with several memorable and extremely fleshed out characters, which is a real testament to Ginzburg's writing and craft. Can't wait to read more of her work.

[Alessia Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Si stese sul letto nella sua stanza. Vedeva, nel bovindo, la vaschetta gialla, la scodellina verde con l’acqua, l’altra scodellina con dei resti di riso. Pensava dei pensieri immobili. “Anche i gatti muoiono” sillabava una voce nella sua testa insensatamente. Trovava strano che da quelle vaschette e scodelle si alzasse tanto dolore, perché nella sua infanzia le era stato insegnato che gli animali non contavano nulla, il loro senso nella nostra vita è nullo, non si soffre sugli animali. Questo le era stato insegnato. Ma la fisiognomia segreta di quel magro gatto si disegnava dolorosamente dentro di lei: egli aveva larghe orecchie marroni e un viso marrone aguzzo e triangolare, sveglio, vivo e serio, uno fra i visi più vivi e più seri che lei avesse mai visto. In quella serietà stava però nascosta tutta l’allegria del mondo. Averlo perduto era una perdita lieve, un dolore di specie povera, ma essa scopriva improvvisamente che anche i dolori di specie povera sono acuti e crudeli, e vanno a prendere posto senza indugio nella zona immensa e indiscriminata dell’infelicità.

[m. · Rating 5 out of 5]

borghesia isn't my favorite of ginzburg's works, but reading family felt like coming home after a long time of being away and smelling the familiar scent of your bedroom and feeling completely at ease for the first time in weeks. carmine was holding both her hands, and stroking them. they were thin, pale, nervous hands. he had known them for a very long time.

[JacquiWine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Family and Borghesia are two separate but related novellas by the Italian neorealist writer Natalia Ginzburg, reissued together in this lovely edition from NYRB Classics. Both stories deal with the messy business of family relationships – how couples come together and subsequently break apart, often creating shock waves across their wider family networks. Viewed together, they illustrate how painful day-to-day life can be, how difficult it is to defend ourselves against unhappiness and detachment.

She remembered saying that there were three things in life you should always refuse: 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. (p. 110)

Central to Family are Carmine, a forty-year-old architect (financially stable but somewhat disaffected by life), and Ivana, a thirty-seven-year-old translator searching for a full-time job. Their stories unfold as a revisitation of the past – a key theme in Ginzburg’s work – taking us back to the time when these two were lovers, despite their differences in background and class. (Carmine’s parents are poor, his mother barely literate, while Ivana’s family are from the educated middle-classes, her father a successful mathematician.)

We follow Carmine and Ivana through the ups and downs of their relationship. They have a child, who subsequently dies at a very young age; their relationship falls apart, and Carmine marries Ninetta, who likes Ivana at first but later turns against her (to a certain extent). Meanwhile, Ivana has a number of lovers, one of whom provides her with a child (Angelica), which Ivana raises on her own. She also falls into a long-term relationship with a doctor who suffers from depression – a condition that culminates in him taking his own life after losing the will to survive.

By now, Carmine spends most of his evenings with Ivana and her daughter, Angelica, neglecting his wife Ninetta and their seven-year-old son, Dadò. In effect, Carmine and Ninetta’s marriage has fallen apart, leaving Carmine to ruminate on times past – not only the chances squandered but the more mundane day-to-day activities too. Central to the novella is our inability to recapture these moments – how we don’t quite appreciate the value of what we’ve got until it’s gone.

To read the rest of my review, please visit:

https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2022...

[Anita · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been loving Natalia Ginzburg this year, and these two novellas are no exception. I particularly liked Borghesia, with its dark humour and fantastic insight on the lives of the middle class characters. She's both witty and generous, a combination that should be more common.

[Michael Jantz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before this, I had read Family Lexicon. These two stories have solidified my love for Ginzburg’s writing and now I will have to read it all.

[Simona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dopo "Lessico familiare" che ho letto alcuni anni fa, anche con questo libro la Ginzburg torna a parlare di una tematica che le è molto cara, ovvero la famiglia, come cambia e come si evolve nel corso del tempo.
"Famiglia" è composta da due capitoli: "Famiglia" e "Borghesia".
In "Famiglia" che dà il titolo al libro, la Ginzburg parla dell'evolversi della famiglia, del concetto di famiglia, mentre "Borghesia" è la storia dei cambiamenti che avvengono all'interno di una famiglia: dalla separazione della figlia di Ilaria, la protagonista agli oggetti e al legame che si instaura con essi.
I personaggi descritti in questi due capitoli sono personaggi incerti, insicuri, infelici che cercano di uscire dal grigiore e dal torpore, attaccandosi alla vita e facendo in modo di non lasciarla sfuggire.

[D · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perfect. Both novellas, ‘Family’ and ‘Borghesia’ tell a story about life and death in a group of related (by blood or otherwise) people. The characters are given unusual depth, also obtained through their relationships with the others.

A good characterization of Ginsburg’s genius can be found on the back cover of the book:

“There is no one quite like Ginzburg for telling it like it is. Her unique, immediately recognizable voice is at once clear and shaded, artless and sly, able to speak of the deepest sorrows and smallest pleasures of everyday life.” (Phillip Lopate)

[Anetq · Rating 4 out of 5]

A story about family - the one you choose a bit more than the one you are born into. A small book that manages to give the impression of a whole confusing bunch of people milling in and out of each other's lives, but at the same time a play in few acts.
All of it in the third person, and for a long time not making clear who the main character is. Masterly written.

[Jinan Paquin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incwedible

[Afi (WhatAfiReads) · Rating 4 out of 5]

How does a book has everything and nothing at the same time? And once again, it laments how much Ginzburg's writing is quite something else, and how her stories are all different from the other, but the one constant that makes me still look forward to her other works - is in the way she writes about people. And that's something that takes immense talent to write something so straightforward but also carries so much heart and soul.

"She remembered saying that there were three things in life you should always refuse: 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. They were too strong and too cunning for mere humans."

Family and Borghesia - two short novellas compiled in this one edition, in which is at the core is a sordid family affair. Whilst one handles families that are found through friendships and past relationships, the other handles a family affair and the presence of animals within one. What makes them similar is how both families seemed quite uncoventional but can also be observed in any other regular family that you know of. Its a show on how every family has their own secrets and how no one is ever perfect.

In Family, Ginzburg focused more on the flaws of humans and complexity and dynamics of different relationships. Its in the everyday, of life and death, and in the mundane daily lives and stupid mistakes. I didn't bawl my eyes out from this story but I was left feeling empty and hollow at the end of the book. The relationship of Carmine and Ivana, two people who had once been together but now are friends, in their mid 30s navigating life. Its life and death and more. And I get why the novella was named as such. Sometimes, families does not necessarily have to be tied by blood, its also formed by ties of the people around that cares about you.

In Borghesia, it takes a lighter tone than Family, but has the same essence that Ginzburg wants to portray. The complex family dynamics and adding animals in the equation makes it quite entertaining to say the least. I love the question of unhapiness in here and how there is a way to avoid them. And at the end, there's no life if there is none bit of unhapiness involved.

At the end, Ginzburg has sealed a place in my heart. Her writing is simple and does not have the complex proses if we are comparing with Ferrante, but there is a constant in her works. She knows how to bring out the emotions of the mundane, the normal everyday lives of normal people and turning them into a spotlight of their own. Even flawed, messy and complicated some relationships can be, Ginzburg shows what its like to be just that - human.

4🌟 overall for this gem.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning as usual. “Family” ends with a paragraph that’s among Ginzburg’s best ever, but “Borghesia” is my overall favorite, and not just because of the cats. Not sure there’s any writer better than Ginzburg at capturing the ways that boredom is intermingled with happiness, albeit a kind that can only be fully recognized ex post facto.

[Lisachan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Io devo avere una fascinazione per la media borghesia di inizio seconda metà del secolo scorso, perché leggere la Ginzburg degli anni '70 mi ha dato la stessa identica sensazione di leggere la Sagan degli anni '50. Le due scrittrici, pur in contesti differenti, parlano in sostanza della stessa cosa: del vuoto emotivo di una casta agiata e culturalmente evoluta che si ritrova impreparata a confrontarsi con sentimenti dai quali credeva che il proprio ceto l'avrebbe protetta, l'universalità della morte, della distanza, della perdita, dei dolori piccoli e meschini che giorno dopo giorno incidono la vita di una persona, lasciando una ferita che raramente si richiude mai del tutto. I protagonisti dei due racconti che compongono il romanzo, Famiglia e Borghesia, affrontano questi dolori con la stessa distrazione dei personaggi della Sagan. Distratti come sono, fronteggiano l'emozione con stupore, come un ospite inatteso, e con stupore si rendono conto di non essere pronti ad affrontarla, morendo entrambi, alla fine, lasciandosi alle spalle solo confusione e sospesi, e una generazione di "piccoli", la generazione dei nostri genitori, ugualmente impreparati ad affrontare l'emotività della vita. Leggendo libri sui nostri nonni, impariamo a conoscere i nostri genitori.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first introduction to Ginzburg and I was initially taken aback by the simplicity of her writing and by how much she fills her sentences with narrative details.

I normally would not be impressed by writing that goes something like: “so and so went here. the woman looked like this. the man looked like this. then the next day they went here.” It’s all very matter of fact with only the briefest exposition or introspection.

But, I loved it? Every so often, a snarky sentence would appear that was made even funnier by the direct and simple delivery. This type of writing could easily lead to flat characters but in both novellas, Ginzburg’s ragtag group of characters feel real and relatable.

These novellas are very much slice of life, but not just any slice. They detail THE slice of life, the slice that is the thinnest yet richest of all, when things have fallen into place for once and everyone is content and healthy. Ginzburg shows how those days feel boring and unremarkable when being lived and only realized as the the best days of one’s life when they have become a distant memory.

She does so much with so little and the longer I reflect on this book, the more I love and am impressed by it.

[anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Both novellas are excellent. Ginzburg's writing is remarkable - concise, brief, sharp, insightful. Her focus is on individuals and their families or relationships that are unique without being unrealistic - but she is typically writing about much more without being heavy handed.

In both novellas, there is a sense of characters trying to live life fully while also racing against the limited time we have.

The bookends-like structure of Family is particularly effective.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Gabriela · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not a fan of novellas (they tend to be like eating half of a dessert), but Ginzburg's writings are always worth it and the stories felt complete.

[Jude Burrows · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5. i found these two novellas to be succinct examples of the strengths of ginzburg’s writing, though i enjoyed the first, ‘family’, more so than the second, ‘borghesia’. when first encountered, the bluntness of ginzburg’s writing can seem unsatisfactory, glossing over seemingly important details or opportunities to better understand the characters that she writes about. this can be the case, though it was not here. once again we are presented with a cast of beautifully eccentric characters that epitomise the sheer variety of ways in which humanity can manifest itself, and the relationships that ensue are beautiful in their own strangely individual ways. i found ginzburg’s directness here to almost perfectly summarise how we can not truly understand our feelings, and yet have to feel them anyway, building our lives and our happiness around them, striving to live even when it seems it would be easier not too. this was especially poignant in ‘family’ which i found poetically depicted how our lives can be so utterly different to what we might hope for.

[Carolina · Rating 4 out of 5]

En realitat, Family ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Borguesia ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Crec que m’ha agradat més la segona perquè és molt més entretinguda, molt més plot twist encara que el final és igual de dramatic. Massa drama o massa cru però espectacular la forma d’escriure de la Ginzburg. Al final tots els tios són uns capullos que no cuiden ni valoren el que tenen i les dones unes pobres desgraciades que intenten cuidar gats.

[sophie adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was going to be a 3 star-review but the way this afterword almost pulled it to a 5. Spellbound.

‘’Carmine was holding both her hands and stroking them. They were thin, pale, nervous hands. He had known them for a very long time.’ Even such a short passage - a single sentence in Italian… uses past perfect to create a sense of temporal depth: Ivana’s hands in the present merge with the hands Carmine first knew when they were lovers, more than a decade before.’

[Chelsea]

her prose is so strangely simple and dry, yet hypnotic

[Iman · Rating 5 out of 5]

WHO’S CUTTING ONIONS

[rachy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really love Natalia Ginzburg, especially her shorter fiction, but I have to admit that both stories in this little collection really didn’t hit for me. While they had some of the hallmarks of Ginzburg’s unique charm, they didn’t have quite enough of it to enchant me in the same way a lot of her other books have.

The main issue really was that both of these novellas were just a little too busy for me. Too many characters introduced too quickly that it was hard to keep separate and memorable in my mind, and given over too short a window. It wasn’t strictly a clarity issue, I could mostly remember who was who, but it was more that I didn’t have enough time with each character to understand and so care about them enough to then care about their story. It also felt like a lot of being told about the connections between characters rather than really getting an opportunity to feel this, which kept me at a bit of a distance from the stories here.

They also didn’t feel as tight and concise as a lot of Ginzburg’s other work. In so many of her works, it feels like nary a word more than is strictly necessary is used. Everything is carefully placed and stripped back to only its very necessary components, and to great effect. Here it felt like there was lots of extraneous detail that to me added little to each story and only slowed them down. It’s not as if Ginzburg’s prose was bad here, that’s almost an impossibility, but it just wasn’t used to the great effect it normally is.

So hopefully this is just a one off. I also don’t think it can be helped when it goes from a few rediscovered gems being republished to what is almost a writers back catalogue. And if anyone deserves that it is definitely Ginzburg. It just becomes harder to tell which ones will be the real gems and which ones were forgotten for a reason. After all, even the best of writers rarely have no duds in their back catalogue. This certainly won’t put me off Ginzburg though, yes these stories weren’t as good as a lot of her other work I’ve read, but they weren’t without skill entirely, and I see them as the exception rather than the rule. A little disappointing maybe, but in no way damning.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit of mischief doubtless inspired the titles of these two late novellas, which have appeared together since their first publication. While “Famiglia” tells the story of an unlikely group of friends over the years and offers a fairly damning portrait of bourgeois insincerity and restlessness, “Borghesia” concerns an extended family living together in one apartment building and shares its name with a song sung by one of its minor characters.

To some extent, then, the titles are ironic, as in Ginzburg’s great short story “La madre,” but if the barbs directed at the characters are sharper here, the irony of the titles is less cutting, because family is in fact what this book is really about, even as the word must be broadened to include not only its original, etymological sense of “household servants” but also and especially those attachments created not by marriage or procreation but elective affinities. In these stories these latter arrangements, occasionally trying but freely entered into, offering the chance for genuine self-expression, find their antithesis in the bourgeois family, which on the contrary appears stifled by decorum and a virtual guarantor of mediocrity.

The kind of unromanticized stories on offer here, in which romantic yearning nevertheless has its place, seems to me very common in life and rather rare in fiction (not to mention movies). They are stories about how life happens, how choices are made and lead us to the next place; but also about how those choices are often not freely or honestly made—constrained by duty or propriety, material want or greed, or boredom—and their consequences often unpredictable. If “Famiglia” and “Borghesia” can at times seem somewhat more programmatic and a bit less fun than the likes of “Valentino” and “Sagittario,” they are also more ambitiously orchestrated, taking on society as well as colorful individuals, the institution of family as well as individual families, a change in scale reflected in the novellas’ titles—entirely accurately, in this case.