All Our Yesterdays

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Ginzburg’s novels manage not only to accommodate, but to place into a meaningful relationship the intimate lives of fictional characters and the radical social and political changes unfolding around them.

her novels are sometimes touted as being quite Pym-like in style, but she’s quite prejudiced in terms of class dynamics to the point where I don’t think I can read read her any more. Personalising the experience of war such a valuable thing, helping us fortunate enough not to have been through one to understand its effects. It’s also clearly a novel informed by personal experiences and memories, written by a woman who lived through the turmoil of a country at war – a point that adds a genuine sense of poignancy and authenticity to the story as it unfolds.

A Polish Jew named Franz, a friend of Emanuele’s father, also makes his way to San Costanzo, further complicating the situation. For Ginzburg and her characters, though, ideology and nationality are separate: the fascists do not represent Italy for them, and when the Germans sweep in they are treated like an invading force, not friendly partners. 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.

Recently married to Emilio, the father of her baby boy, she fears for the family’s safety – consequently, her nights are haunted by dreams of fleeing should the Germans advance further. She doesn't dramatise matters, and the narrative phrasing rarely extends over more than a paragraph, and mostly is confined to single sentences. In looking for reviews on the book (which was originally published in 1952 in Italian and then in 1956 in English by Angus Davidson), I found a review in The Guardian (see the first review below) and the reviewers says not to start off with Natalia Ginzburg’s oeuvre with this book because “. The daughter of the middle-class family realizes how pitiful their preparations are and she asks the rich neighbors if she can shelter in their basement when necessary. But it is also a story about the possibility of knowing what is right, and living by that knowledge, whatever the consequences.

It’s a brilliant novel, full of warmth, intelligence and humanity, punctuated by wry observations on the tangled business of life. All Our Yesterdays, then, is another superb novel by Ginzburg; a seamless blend of the personal with the global, where the comparatively smaller dilemmas of families and relationships can be as debilitating and crushing to individuals as the bigger, large-scale dramas of politics, war and violence. Pressburger is best known as the screenwriting half of one of the last century’s great film-making duos: along with Michael Powell he produced masterpiece after masterpiece in the 1940s, from The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp to The Red Shoes.

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. And that was a good thing, because when fate announced itself with a loud fanfare of trumpets you always had to be a little on your guard.When Germany invades Poland in 1939 and Britain and France declare war, our Italians are still convinced their country won’t enter the war on either side. The two of them have “great discussions” together, “but no one knew quite what they were about, because if anyone else was present they started talking in German”. Natalia Ginzburg (née Levi) was an Italian author whose work explored family relationships, politics during and after the Fascist years and World War II, and philosophy. Residing opposite them is another family – Mammina, the second wife of an old man, along with their two sons, the down-to-earth Emanuele, and the snobbish, uppity Guima. And yet, at the novel’s close, after the war has ended, Ginzburg is careful to show the difficult task that awaits those who survive.