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- Herausgeber: Daunt Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
'A glowing light of modern Italian literature.' -- New York Times'If Ferrante is a friend, Ginzburg is a mentor.' -- Lara Feigel, Guardian'I did not know,' I said, 'that life could go at a run, with drums beating. For you, it is different. Your life, after I came into it, went on at its usual pace, without any sound.'In a hushed Italian town after the Second World War, Elsa lives with her parents in the house where she was born. Twenty-seven and unmarried, she is of constant concern to her mother, whose status anxiety manifests itself in acute hypochondria. But her mother does not know that Elsa has fallen in love with Tommasino, the elusive youngest son of the De Francisci family. The De Franciscis own the cloth factory that dominates the town and Elsa knows the details of their lives as intimately as her own.In the course of their secret meetings, Elsa begins to imagine a future with Tommasino, free from the constraints of shared history and expectation. But all of this is threatened when their relationship is revealed.An elegant, spare novel reminiscent of Chekhov, Voices in the Evening is an unforgettable story about first love and lost chances, from one of the greatest Italian writers of the twentieth century.'Like Chekhov, she knows how to stand back and let her characters expose their own lives, their frailties and strengths, their illusions and private griefs. The result is nearly translucent writing – writing so clear, so direct, so seemingly simple that it gives the reader the magical sense of apprehending the world for the first time.' -- New York Times'Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like.' -- Rachel Cusk'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.' -- Maggie Nelson'Sharp and lively.' -- Lydia DavisTranslated by D.M. Low
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‘Like Chekhov, she knows how to stand back and let her characters expose their own lives, their frailties and strengths, their illusions and private griefs. The result is nearly translucent writing – writing so clear, so direct, so seemingly simple that it gives the reader the magical sense of apprehending the world for the first time.’ New York Times
‘A profound commentary on Italian life.’ Tim Parks, London Review of Books
‘Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like.’ Rachel Cusk
‘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.’ Maggie Nelson
‘Sharp and lively.’ Lydia Davis
Selected works by Natalia Ginzburg
The Road to the City
All Our Yesterdays
Family Lexicon
Happiness, As Such
The Manzoni Family
The Little Virtues
The City and the House
Voices in the Evening
NATALIA GINZBURG
Translated by D.M. LowWith an introduction by Colm Tóibín
DAUNT BOOKS
To Gabriele
Contents
Introduction
The rise of Fascism and the Second World War darkened Natalia Ginzburg’s imagination irrevocably; it made its way into every aspect of the lives she dramatised in her books, becoming almost ordinary, almost casual. When the war was over, Ginzburg became interested in more mundane manifestations of conflict – conflict within families, between men and women, between parents and children, between competing versions of reality, between competing narratives of the past. These conflicts became the subject for her novel Voices in the Evening, published in 1961.
In these years Ginzburg moved between fact and fiction, between what she remembered and what she imagined. In 1963, when Ginzburg was forty-seven, her memoir, and most famous book, Family Lexicon was published. In the book, she remembered with puzzlement the arguments about fascism between her father and her siblings. ‘I still can’t understand what they were arguing about so vehemently since my father and siblings were all against fascism.’ Opposition to fascism becomes part of the ordinary fabric of her memoir; it is merely one of the matters competing for the author’s attention, part of family life, remembered in the same way as meals or discussions of apartments and clothes.
Ginzburg did not overdramatise the war in her writing, but sought to integrate it into daily life; it seemed part of normality until it came close and then it tore the lives of her characters asunder. ‘For years,’ she writes in Family Lexicon, ‘many people remained at home, unaffected, continuing to do what they had always done. Then … bombs and mines suddenly exploded everywhere, buildings collapsed, and the streets were full of rubble, soldiers, and refugees. Soon, no one was left who could pretend it wasn’t happening …’
Thus the story of the war years darkens. The father’s antics and his mock-rages in Family Lexicon become less comic, as do the mother’s dreaminess and her domesticity. Natalia’s brother Mario is arrested on the Swiss border; her father is held for a time by the Italian police. Soon, another brother is arrested. And Turin, where the family lives, begins to change: ‘For years now, Turin was full of German Jews who’d fled Germany. Some of them were even assistants in my father’s laboratory. They were people without a country. Maybe, soon, we would be without a country, forced to move from one country to another, from one police station to the next, without work or roots or family or homes.’
In 1940, Ginzburg and her husband and their three children were banished by the authorities to a remote village in Abruzzo. After the fall of Mussolini, Ginzburg’s husband was held by the Nazis in Rome and tortured to death by them.
In her essays, collected in the volume A Place to Live, Ginzburg writes about how deeply the war years and the years of Fascism marked her. In ‘The Son of Man’, she writes, ‘It is useless to think we can recover from twenty years of what we went through. Those of us who were persecuted will never again rest easy … The experience of evil, once suffered, is never forgotten.’ The city of Rome, where she lived in hiding as the war came to an end, remains a haunted place for her, filled with memories of fear and confusion that entered her spirit then and remained alive within her imagination.
Her novel Voices in the Evening was published in 1961. In a Preface to Family Lexicon, she begins: ‘The places, events, and people in this book are real. I haven’t invented a thing, and each time I found myself slipping into my long-held habits as a novelist and made something up I was quickly compelled to destroy the invention.’ The brief Author’s Note at the beginning of Voices in the Evening, on the other hand, reads: ‘The places and characters in this story are imaginary. The first are not found on any map, the others are not alive, nor have they ever lived, in any part of the world. I am sorry to say this having loved them as though they were real.’
Strangely, despite these warnings to the reader, Family Lexicon actually seems more like a novel; it is filled with a rich texture that suggests invention. There is a sort of ease in its tone that indicates a world fully imagined rather than one fitfully remembered. It is all vivid and confident.
In contrast, Voices in the Evening has many gaps; it reads as though its details were summoned by the author from the past, leaving much to the reader’s imagination. If the memoir is made in technicolour, then Voices in the Evening is a sepia photograph or fragments of a film whose main narrative has been lost. Its very shape seems to reflect memory in all its flickering uncertainty and its moments of pure clarity.
Voices in the Evening is an ingeniously created novel, a fictional world made all the richer by its tentative narrative structure. As with the opening sections of Family Lexicon and some of Ginzburg’s essays, the book is haunted by the war, by who was Fascist or anti-Fascist, who was shot, who was imprisoned, who escaped. It is capable of dealing with these matters lightly, as though political affiliation were a question of manners as much as morals. For example, instead of being indignant at the Fascism of Purillo, their neighbour and colleague, the people in the village ‘all made fun of Purillo because he was such a Fascist, and they mimicked him receiving the Party officers at the works, and being lavish with the Roman salute’.
The novel is set in the war’s aftermath, a time of peace, a peace broken only by the nature of the characters themselves, their unsettled spirits and argumentative souls.
The opening of the book makes clear that Ginzburg has an astonishing tonal command, as Elsa’s mother speaks to herself in a cross between monologue and dialogue. This operates as comedy, but only to some extent; it also, because it forces her daughter to be silent, suggests Elsa’s isolation and perhaps her way of remaining apart. There is an undercurrent in the novel that is brisk and businesslike, but is also bathed in irony and ambiguity and filled with shimmering, risky, darting observation. It is as though the world of Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen, the characters brittle and filled with anxiety, or the clipped, spare tone of Muriel Spark, had been grafted onto the life of an Italian village in the post-war period.
All encounters in Voices in the Evening serve to create an atmosphere of distance and estrangement. It is tempting to use images of warfare, or words such as skirmish and siege, to describe this enclosed world. If there is love, for example, soon there is sorrow. When Gemmina fell in love with Nebbia, for example, ‘This caused her distress, because love made her still thinner and plainer.’
When Vincenzino falls in love with a Brazilian girl who comes with her parents and her younger brother to visit him, he soon realises that ‘he was sick to death of Mamita, Papito, Fifito and the girl, and could not see how to disentangle himself from them’. Soon afterwards, Vincenzino marries someone else, but does so ‘without love’. His wife feels no love either. ‘After he married her Vincenzino realised that he had nothing to say to her. They passed the evenings in silence, the one opposite the other in armchairs in the sitting room.’
When the couple separates, they quarrel over linen. This is described in the same dry, distant factual way as the return of another character ‘from being a prisoner in Germany with his lungs in a bad state and with some internal trouble’. Later, when the father in the novel finds himself in the company of a dissident Communist, it is noted: ‘Communists, dissident or not, give him a stomach-ache.’
While much of the book is funny or has a tone that is often startling and unsettling, the saddest part is the doomed engagement of Elsa and Tommasino. When their relationship, described in rich, melancholy detail, finally ends, Elsa’s mother cries and faints, causing Elsa to comment: ‘My father told my mother to leave me in peace. He said that the young people of today had psychological problems of a subtle, complicated kind which it was not given to them, the old generation, to understand.’
This idea of a complex and tangled inner life connected to family and history is one of Ginzburg’s themes which she teases out in her essay ‘Universal Compassion’: ‘We have come to recognise that no event, public or private, can be considered or judged in isolation, for the more deeply we probe the more we find infinitely ramifying events that preceded it, all the way back to its source.’
In Voices in the Evening, Ginzburg sets out to dramatise the infinitely ramifying events in the lives of characters who are subtle and complex, who keep much hidden, not least easy emotion. She lets them speak for themselves, but more important, she allows them to be silent, to give nothing away. She creates their relationships and conflicts with comic vitality and energy. It is easy to see why, having finished the book, she came to love these characters ‘as though they were real’.
Colm Tóibín, 2019
Author’s Note
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.
Translator’s Note
It is an ancient and widespread custom in Italy to give people nicknames by which they are known not only to their intimates, but to the world at large. This is so much so that sometimes few people know a man’s real name. Thus in the present work one of the chief characters, De Francisci, is universally known as Balotta, that is Little Ball, and another one as Purillo from the peculiar cap invariably worn by him. This man’s surname is only casually revealed towards the end of the book. The real name of a man known as Nebbia, that is Mist, is never mentioned. The meaning of some of these nicknames has been inserted in the translation at their first occurrence.
It is also well known that in Italian, as in several other languages, people on intimate terms address one another in the second person singular. This usage would be out of place in modern English dialogue. Accordingly the plural pronoun and verb have been substituted in this translation without comment. In some places however the use of the second person singular is referred to explicitly in the course of the story. In such places a phrase about ‘the familiar form of address’ has been inserted in the English text, or one speaker has been made to address another as ‘my dear’. The reader will understand that in such places the speaker was using the second person singular.
D.M.L.
