Sunday Morning! “Voices in the Evening” by Natalia Ginzburg

At first, I didn’t really get the flavor of Natalia Ginzburg; I felt like I was missing something. About 40 pages in, I had to start over again. This sometimes happens to me.

Perhaps, I had been badly prepared by the exuberant praise her prose elicits. Oh, the sentences! Those strange and beguiling sentences! For some reason, I was imagining something like Thomas Wolfe or Anaïs Nin where the prose bowls you over, verbal pyrotechnics, clusterbombs of adjectives. Does Ginzburg use any adjectives? She reminds me a bit of Hemingway in fact- a light eater, who maybe adds a dash of adjectives and a single sprig of verbal description to last a whole story. And absolutely no adverbs! I mean, it’s hard to believe she was Italian. (Hard for the Fascists, too.)

Sometimes, for me, the world seems crammed with too much detail to take in over one lifetime. This is a bit what it’s like having landed in New York City this week and trying to navigate the teeming salmagundi around Houston Street- the world is thick with detail.

But, in Natalia Ginzburg’s little novellas, the world is just there, right in front of us as clear as day- but not quite. And, I suppose, in life, the world sometimes seems that way too: like an exhibit in a museum, not quite real. I’ll admit her prose does capture the dissociated texture of unfeeling clarity: Things are the way they are and we can’t do anything about it. People do things and say things and, for some reason, none of it quite means anything, not to them. It’s an atmosphere that seemingly permeated post-war Italy- I was reminded quite a bit of Antonioni’s films reading Ginzburg. What are the character’s motivations for their actions? Why can’t they get it together? They don’t really know.

Natalia and Leone Ginzburg

And sometimes our motivations are the things we don’t want to think about. The obvious subtext of those post-war years was the catastrophe of Fascism, a history that currently seems doomed to repeat itself. Ginzburg had to publish under a false name at points due to anti-Semitic laws; her husband went into internal exile during the war years and was eventually tortured to death for his anti-Fascist activities. How does one carry on after that? The seeming answer is just the same as before, but a little more absurdly. It’s like watching a play and part of the scenery collapses and is quickly fixed; the play resumes, but it’s a bit hard to believe now. As a Jew, Ginzburg is a bemused spectator of bourgeois gentiles, only she knows now what they’re fully capable of.

And incapable: the family at the center of her short novel Voices in the Evening seems broken and patched back together in some unnamable way, unable to connect with or give themselves to other people. And they’re the heart of the town. Old Balotta, a socialist, started the cloth factory that occupies nearly everyone and gives off a strange odor. Instead of leaving it to the care of one of his five children, he put it in the possibly more capable hands of his adopted son Purillo, a Fascist during the war, who also saved Balotta’s life. Other children were on the other side: his daughter Gemmina whose great love Nebbia wound up murdered; Rafaella, the Marxist who spent the war hiding with partisans; Mario, a happy-go-lucky who married a Russian snob, wound up dragged to Germany by troops, fell ill and died. Nobody made out well, but that’s all behind them now.

Alas, nobody made it out unbroken either. Purillo can’t exactly live with himself; he blames Mussolini for siding with Hitler. The son Vincenzo, who naturally resents Purillo, almost married a girl from Brazil, who might have made him happy, but her family made him miserable. Instead, he married Cáte without love. Unwilling to be cruel, he turns a blind eye to her lovers, separates from her, and loses her forever. “Happiness,” he says, “always seems nothing; it is like water; one only realizes when it has run away.” He dies in a car accident.

And then, finally, we have the emotionally inert son Tommasino, who may or may not be in love with the narrator of the story, Elsa. He doesn’t want to marry her, or anyone, but the family might have different plans. In fact, that’s the common theme here: the older generation can’t help but screw up their children, but the children can’t seem to get anything right or commit to anything. Elsa comments:

“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.”

Maybe not the reader either. The narrative, too, is clipped and distancing. It covers a great deal in 125 pages, but it does so in flashes and shards. It’s gossipy, but the narrator never judges or comes to hard and fast conclusions about these people. The war is always present, even though in the past, but we’re never quite sure why it affected them this way. Why can’t they do the right things and be happy? As with most of us, it’s no real mystery what they need to do, in each instance. So, what’s wrong with them? Why can’t they get it together?

If it’s the aftermath of war, I’ve discussed that as much, or more, in this post than the characters do in the text. If it’s their resentment for Purillo the Fascist, they mostly treat him with quiet indifference and mockery. The past is something they live with quietly, like an unwelcome guest who might leave if ignored. The world is right there, but nothing is ever really dealt with. But how could you deal with the familial damage caused by this national cataclysm? The seismic waves keep resounding even if you pretend not to hear them. It’s ironic to think that fascism claimed to strengthen the nation and family.

And so, what are YOU reading, writing, watching, pondering, playing, creating, or shoving under the rug this weekend?