Tag: Natalia Ginzburg

Patient with the French | From Natalia Ginzburg’s memoir Family Lexicon

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In the autumn, I went with my mother to visit Mario, who was now living in a small town near Clermont-Ferrand. He was teaching in a boarding school. He had become great friends with the school’s headmaster and his wife. He said that they were extraordinary people, very sophisticated and honest, the kind of people you could only find in France. In his small room he had a coal stove. From his window you could see the countryside covered in snow. Mario wrote long letters to Chiaromonte and Cafi in Paris. He translated Herodotus and fiddled with the stove. Under his jacket, he wore a dark turtleneck sweater that the headmaster’s wife had made for him. To thank her, he’d given her a sewing basket. Everyone in the town knew him. He stopped and chatted with everyone and he was asked by all to come home with them and drink “le vin blanc.”

My mother said, “How French he’s become!”

In the evenings, he played cards with the headmaster and his wife. He listened to their conversations and discussed educational methods with them. They also spoke a long time about whether or not there had been enough onion in the soup served at dinner.

“How patient he’s become!” my mother said. “How patient he is with these people. With us he never had any patience. Whenever he was home, he thought we were all so boring. These people seem even more boring than we are!”

And she said, “He’s patient with them only because they’re French!”

From Natalia Ginzburg’s 1963 memoir Lessico famigliare, in translation (under the title Family Lexicon) by Jenny McPhee.

 

All inextricably linked to those words and phrases | From Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon

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 My parents had five children. We now live in different cities, some of us in foreign countries, and we don’t write to each other often. When we do meet up we can be indifferent or distracted. But for us it takes just one word. It takes one word, one sentence, one of the old ones from our childhood, heard and repeated countless times. All it takes is for one of us to say “We haven’t come to Bergamo on a military campaign,” or “Sulfuric acid stinks of fart,” and we immediately fall back into our old relationships, our childhood, our youth, all inextricably linked to those words and phrases. If my siblings and I were to find ourselves in a dark cave or among millions of people, just one of those phrases or words would immediately allow us to recognize each other. Those phrases are our Latin, the dictionary of our past, they’re like Egyptian or Assyro-Babylonian hieroglyphics, evidence of a vital core that has ceased to exist but that lives on in its texts, saved from the fury of the waters, the corrosion of time. Those phrases are the basis of our family unity and will persist as long as we are in the world, re-created and revived in disparate places on the earth whenever one of us says, “Most eminent Signor Lipmann,” and we immediately hear my father’s impatient voice ringing in our ears: “Enough of that story! I’ve heard it far too many times already!”

From Natalia Ginzburg’s 1963 memoir Lessico famigliare, in translation (under the title Family Lexicon) by Jenny McPhee.

I love this book so far, and this passage may come as close as anything to an early thesis for what Ginzburg is doing. I suppose, too, I deeply identify with this idea, this notion of phrases, saying, quips, in jokes, etc., as the psychological basis of familial identification.

Bunch’s Moderan/Ginzburg’s Dry Heart (Books acquired, 14 July 2023)

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Picked up two on Friday—

I’ve been wanting to read Natalia Ginzburg for a while, and when I saw a used copy of her novella The Dry Heart (translated by Frances Frenaye), it seemed like a good entry point. It was really the description on the back that grabbed me:

The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: “I shot him between the eyes.” As the tale—a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness—proceeds, the narrator’s murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg’s writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage. She transforms the unhappy tale of an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that seems to beg the question: why don’t more wives kill their husbands?

I read NYRB’s collected Moderan a few years ago, but I couldn’t pass up this Avon Bard mass market paperback.

Opening track:

“THINKING BACK (OUR GOD IS A HELPING GOD!)”

by

David R. Bunch

FLESH seemed doomed that year; death’s harpies were riding down. The once-beautiful, sweet and life-sustaining air was tinged with poison now, and man drank at his peril from the streams that had once been pure. He prayed to a God that was said to be in all things good, true and beautiful, but especially was thought to be all sternness and goodness, justice and loving-care, in some milk-white place far away, “On High.” And those prayers if answered were answered very obliquely indeed. For the air got deeper in poison from the tinkering with lethal things the flesh-man indulged in when not praying, and the water got fuller with danger as each new explosion pounded the bomb-fevered air. There was talk of the End; great discussions were handled in great halls across the land. Treaties were signed among statesmen to help the air get better, to allow the streams to recover and run pure once again. But even as the flesh-hands grasped the pens to scrawl the marks of good faith in some countries, fear lashed at capitals in other countries. Arsenals were tested anew. Things done were undone. The air got sicker; the streams ran not pure but pure danger—There seemed no chance for flesh-man, and his God seemed entirely silent wherever He was, wherever His white throne was. The HOPELESS signs were out everywhere. Little children asked that they be allowed to go quickly and not grow up hurting and maimed. Adults in what should have been the full flower of brave manhood and fair womanhood quaked, looked heavenward for some hopeful sign and, finding none, fell down and cried bitterly. The aged ones, quavering and whining now, finally decided that yes, truly they were most glad that they were so very old. The flesh billions courted at the Palace of Danger so ardently had turned against them and the mass wedding of Death and Destruction seemed now all but assured.

And then—and then this chance! Offered to all. It came first as small hope, the rumor of it, a faint faint breath of a chance seeping through the flesh-fouled metropolises. And then it was confirmed as glowing fact when the tour went round that year, year of the Greatest Darkness. And yet—and yet they scoffed, scoffed by the billions at this man working his hinges and braces, would not believe his heart was an ever-last one, had no credulity for his new wonderful lungs that could breathe him a forever-life even in bomb-tainted air. When they saw that his hands were steel they yelled robot! robot! When they saw that his eyes were wide-range, mechanism-helped, and that he’d a phfluggee-phflaggee button on his talker that he pressed from time to time to aid in his speech expression they laughed and yelled . . . Continue reading “Bunch’s Moderan/Ginzburg’s Dry Heart (Books acquired, 14 July 2023)” →