All Our Yesterdays

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em 1952 que Ginzburg, casada já pela segunda vez - o primeiro marido, Leone, judeu e combatente anti-fascista, foi também ele vítima dos nazis - publica esta nostálgica e pungente obra Todos Os Nossos Ontens, cuja atmosfera é intensa, palpitante, quente e fumarenta: a cada parágrafo sentimos adensar-se e aproximar-se um destino inevitável.

Ippolito sinks into a morbid depression at the German occupation of Poland, “with the Germans taking people away to die in the concentration camps … his will to live left him at the thought of those camps, where the Germans put their cigarettes out against the prisoners’ foreheads”.

It perhaps has a different focus from the family oriented book this is, but there’s that same sense of an author drawing on their own experience. That’s a fair point about the novel feeling like an ensemble piece, especially the first section where the focus moves around from one character to another (Ippolito really stands out there too).

Then War suddenly brakes out, her brother Ippolito ends up shooting himself, and in time of dread she is rescued from her plight by Cenzo Rena, an extravagant and eccentric friend of her father’s who turns up out of the blue and offers to marry her. It’s easy to recognise on an intellectual level that this must have been Ginzburg’s intent – to remind every reader that the twentieth-century fascist debacle would be felt long into the future; but there was something more personal about this novel, a familiarity in terms of character and incident that had me respond in an emotional way. Another singular feature of the novel is Ginzburg’s wry humour and deadpan wit as reflected in her striking prose style. 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.

Ginzburg pone su mirada de narradora en Anna, la más pequeña de una familia de cuatro hijos cuya madre ha fallecido. He could produce secret newspapers but not newspapers that were not secret, producing secret newspapers was easy, oh, how easy and how splendid it was.

They were talking politics in the sitting room, they were once again doing a dangerous, secret thing, as the book of memoirs had been. Ginzburg is a unique voice and there’s a direct simplicity to her prose that makes her dry observations all the more riveting. It’s the elder son Ippolito who bears the brunt of his father’s tyranny, forced to assist him with his writing and various other tasks. Jews from some Italian Northern cities are sent to the South, shunting them off to villages where they cannot ‘harm the war’.Its stakes are as high as the most cataclysmic crisis of the 20th century, and as low as the marriage of one young woman, the fate of one family dog. Sally Rooney, in her introduction to this edition, says she hopes readers new to Ginzburg will fall in love with her through All Our Yesterdays, but for me this is not the book for Ginzburg newcomers.

This is a moment of history as lived by ordinary people who are made extraordinary by circumstances. In 1943 the Allies fire-bombed Milan, Turin and Genoa and hundreds were killed and a quarter million left homeless. Jaučiausi šiek tiek apgauta knygos anotacijos – skaitydama ją tikėjausi, kad kūrinys suksis apie Aną ir jos gyvenimą, nėštumą ir to nešamus klausimus, problemas ir nepatogumus karo akivaizdoje, bet gavau kai ką kito. Užliūlioja ta šeimyninė rutina, ir nors žinai, kad fone karas - vis tiek labiau pergyveni dėl kasdieninių rūpesčių ir jausmų.Where the novelty comes in – and reputedly contributed to the book’s failure when first published – is that the central character, to whose hopes the reader must lash themselves for the narrative to work, is a war criminal on the run. 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.