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- Herausgeber: Daunt Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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.
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‘Ginzburg’s books snare so much of what is odd and lovely and fleeting in the world.’ Parul Sehgal, New York Times
‘The voice is pure and unmannered, both entrancing and alarming, elegantly streamlined by the authority of a powerful intelligence.’Deborah Eisenberg, New York Review of Books
‘If Ferrante is a friend, Ginzburg is a mentor.’ Lara Feigel, Guardian
‘Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like.’ Rachel Cusk
‘Her prose style is deceptively simple and very complex. Its effect on the reader is both calming and thrilling – that’s not so easy to do.’ Deborah Levy
Selected works by Natalia Ginzburg
The Dry Heart
All Our Yesterdays
Happiness, As Such
Voices in the Evening
Family Lexicon
The Little Virtues
The City and the House
The Manzoni Family
The Road to the City
natalia ginzburg
Translated by Frances Frenaye
DAUNT BOOKS
The labour of the foolish wearieth every one of them, because he knoweth not how to go to the city.
ecclesiastes x. 15
Contents
1
NINI WAS THE SON of one of my father’s cousins and he had been with us ever since he was a little boy. After the death of his parents he went first to live with his grandfather, but the old man used to beat him with a broomstick and he was always running away to our house. Finally his grandfather died, too, and he was told he could stay with us always.
There were five of us, not counting Nini. The oldest was my sister, Azalea, who had married and gone to live in the city. I came next, and then my three brothers, Giovanni, Gabriele and Vittorio. They say that big families are happy, but I could never see anything particularly happy about ours. Azalea had married and gone away when she was seventeen, and my one ambition was to do likewise. I was seventeen now myself, but I didn’t have any offers. Giovanni and Nini were equally restless; in fact, the two smaller boys were the only ones content to stay where they were.
Our house was red with a pergola in front of it, and we hung our clothes on the banisters because we didn’t have enough cupboards. ‘Shoo, shoo!’ my mother would say as she chased the hens out of the kitchen. ‘Shoo, shoo!’ All day long the gramophone played the same record over and over again:
Velvety hands, your sweet perfu-u-me
Seems to pervade this cosy roo-o-m …
The cadence of this song enchanted us all and we sang it from the time we got up to the time we went to bed. Giovanni and Nini slept in the room next to mine and woke me up every morning with three knocks on the wall. I would get dressed in a hurry and we would all three set out for the city, which was an hour’s walk away. When we got there we lost no time in separating, as if we were total strangers. I usually went to see a friend and strolled with her under the arcades. Sometimes I ran into Azalea with a red nose under her veil, but she refused to speak to me because I hadn’t a hat.
Later in the morning I would eat bread and oranges down by the river or else go to see Azalea. Usually I found her in bed, smoking or reading a novel or having a jealous quarrel with her lover over the telephone, quite heedless of the presence of the children around her. Then her husband would come in for lunch and she would quarrel with him too. Her husband was an oldish man with eyeglasses and a beard. He seldom paid any attention to what she said but read his newspaper, sighing, scratching his head and exclaiming to himself every now and then: ‘God help us!’ Then Ottavia, the fourteen-year-old servant girl, wearing her black hair in an untidy braid and carrying the baby in her arms, would announce from the door: ‘Lunch is ready!’ Azalea would pull on her stockings, yawn and look down at her legs, and then we would all sit down at the table. Whenever the telephone rang Azalea blushed and twisted her napkin in her hands, while Ottavia answered from the next room: ‘She’s busy just now; she’ll call you later.’
After lunch her husband always went out again and Azalea went back to bed, where she almost immediately fell asleep, with a calm and affectionate expression on her relaxed face. The telephone could ring, doors slam and the children shout, but Azalea only breathed deeply and went on sleeping. While Ottavia cleared the table she used to ask me in a frightened manner what would happen if ‘the master’ were to find out. Then she would add in a low voice, with a bitter smile, that ‘the master’ had someone else too. At this point I would leave. I used to wait on a park bench for evening to fall, while my friend and I listened to the music coming from an outdoor café and looked at the dresses on the women passing by. Sometimes I would see Nini and Giovanni go by, but we never spoke. I was sure to meet them later on the dusty road outside the city, while the city lights went on behind us and the café orchestra struck up more gaily than before. We walked silently along the country road, between the river and the trees, until we reached home.
I hated our house. I hated my mother and the bitter sorrel soup that she set before us every evening. If I had met her in the city I should have been ashamed. But she had not gone to the city for years, and now, with her unkempt grey hair and missing front teeth, she seemed for all the world a peasant. ‘You look like a witch, Mother,’ Azalea would say when she came to the house. ‘Why don’t you get some false teeth?’ Then she would lie down on the red couch in the dining room, kick off her shoes, and say: ‘Give me a cup of coffee.’ After she had drunk down the coffee which my mother brought her she would take a nap and then go away. My mother always said that children were serpents’ teeth and that no one had any business bringing them into the world. Indeed she spent all her days cursing her children, one by one.
