All Our Yesterdays

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She had made love with [him] and she knew that he did not love her, she knew that he felt rather sad and humiliated after they had made love together, and she would have liked to go back to the times when they used to read Montale's poems and eat chestnuts, and the war was still a cold, distant war, the Germans hadn't won yet. One family is rich (they own the leather factory in town), and the family next door is middle class. In true Italian fashion, Franz is married to Emanuele’s sister, Amalia, having been involved with the siblings’ mother, Mammina, some years before.

Gaila, nes lūkesčius buvau visai užsikėlusi, bet tai turbūt tik dar vienas priminimas, kad kartais geriau į knygą nerti nieko nežinant ir nesileisti apgaunamai anotacijų.Um dos ensinamentos que sempre retiro deste tipo de literatura é a constatação de que a vida continua, sim, mesmo durante uma guerra. When I first read Natalia Ginzburg’s work several years ago, I felt as if I was reading something that had been written for me, something that had been written almost inside my own head or heart.

But I guess I’ve homed in on Anna because she features quite heavily in part two where we follow her move to the South and her marriage to Cenzo Rena.

A particular sympathy grows up between us and the characters we invent—that our debilitated imagination is still just able to invent—a sympathy that is tender and almost maternal, warm and damp with tears, intimately physical and stifling. It’s the story of two Italian families in the time leading up to and during WW II – roughly 1939 to 1945. I’ve read quite a few of Ginzburg’s novels/novellas over the last few years, but this feel like the one I’ve been hoping to find – major-league stuff, especially given its scope and setting. By sheer coincidence I’ve been reading books set during the Second World War that view events from the Italian perspective – Iris Origo’s two diaries, important pieces of work because they are a first-hand account that captures the immediacy of the events unfolding around her; and All Our Yesterdays, a work of fiction by Natalia Ginzburg also set during the same period but written in the years following the war.

Like any story of the second world war, it tells of almost unendurable grief, loss, violence and injustice.

The manner of telling – long paragraphs, run-on sentences and little direct speech – and the way the story flits from character to character, viewpoints overlapping like tiles on a roof, makes for a dense reading experience, though a rewarding one. In the meantime, I hope you get a chance to read All Our Yesterdays as I think you’ll really appreciate it! Having been scattered across the country, and Europe, by the upheaval of war, the final scene sees the survivors regather and reflect on the recent past – ‘thinking of all those who were dead, and of the long war and the sorrow and noise and confusion’.

As a masterclass in pure storytelling delight, The Glass Pearls might be its most radical reissue yet. In the post-war world, some form of emptiness also gnaws at these survivors, who otherwise used to rebellions, revolutions, and political turmoil, must navigate a welcome but substantially altered and unknown era of peace. In 1943 the Allies fire-bombed Milan, Turin and Genoa and hundreds were killed and a quarter million left homeless. Los tiempos son difíciles: el período en que el nazismo avanzaba sobre el continente bajo la indiferencia de Italia (y de Anna, aunque no de varios de sus allegados), el período en que la guerra se trasladó a Italia, y en la última etapa, la postguerra. As readers, we understand and love the novel’s characters in all their humanity – and for a moment or two, their courage seems to illuminate, in a flash of radiance, the meaning of human life.She seemed to understand about the sitting room, and the sentences in German, and Ippolito stroking his face, and his restless eyes that were always looking for something.