la

THE APPALLING RICHNESS OF RETICENCE: SILENCE IN THE WORK OF NATALIA GINZBURG.

Ginzburg's characters - happy or unhappy, loved or unloved - move through worlds of silence. They struggle not to speak, not to say what they feel - theirs is not so much the silence of the poet or the mystic, forever lapsing into speechlessness before the Inexpressible, but rather the struggle of those who already know their own words and smother them, fearing their terrible meaning.

Such silences in the stories of Natalia Ginzburg, although manifold in their variety,

enjoy only a limited ambiguity, having all too often ,one characteristic in common: the impression of something distinct but as yet unsaid, drawn but held in reserve. Critics seem uncertain how to evaluate the atmospheres such silences generate in her work. Most seem to agree upon a tentative gloom which appears to underlie most of Ginzburg's fiction. Bullock discerns "a preference for themes and siruations that are elegiac, if not uncompromisingly pessimistic. "1 John Gan Rutter perceives an "oppressive and pervasive nullity" in the condition of women in Ginzburg's stories, even if lhe silences in the text "create the space where understanding is established between writer and reader."1 Even Sharon Wood, whose earlier study saw in Ginzburg's opere "a generous embracing of a world richer than any single shibboleth or ideology,", nevertheless acknowledges a "minute, painful and ironic analysis" of society in works such as Caro Michele and le Voci de/la Sera, coupled with a position which is both "oblique and complex."' Only critics who base their interpretations of Ginzburg on one book alone - her most famous work, Less/co Famfg/iare

-

have anything cheedul to say about her. Christopher Cairn's

simplistic and very English reading of Less/co, for example, seems so curiously obsessed with the 'ltalianness' of the novel (the mother, we are told, is "an Italian mother" with a "likeable feminine individuality"; the father is "instantly Italian ... paternalistic but everlastingly affectionate",) that it hardly has time to talk about anything else. The fact that silence, more than any other single motif, dominates tlte fiction of Natalia Ginzburg and lends her style its quiet, careful intensity, does not mean that there are no talkative characters in her work.

Such characters, however, appear like beacons of noise and vitality in

otherwise calm and desolate seas. They are treated in two ways: either their endless observations

are detachedly reproduced, bereft of any commentary or character elaboration (as with the case of the nanator's mother in Le Voci de/la Sera), or rather the characters' garrulousness is made clear and extensively paraptuased, but never a word is given to them during the course of the story (Scilla and the mother in Sagittario, for example, or the rambling falher in Valentino).

In both

cases one apprehends the characters' talkativeness with a mixture of admiration and melancholy, as if they are carrying on a fight which the rest of the characters have long since given up. "Si fa per fare un po' di conversazione," defends the molher in Le Voci, "Vuoi mica che stiamo qui tutta le sera a guardarci negli occhi? Si racconta, si parla. Chi dice una cosa. chi dice un'altra" (756).'

27

Offering sober contrast to the reticence of those around them, it becomes difficult to know exactly how Ginzburg wants us to respond to such figures - a mild snigger at the e>.'})Cnse of their banal superficiality? Or a profounder sympathy with their failure to overcome a certain solipsism in the human condition? In one instance, at least, Ginzburg's own thoughts on silence are clear enough. Her 1951 essay "Silenzio," written in Torino a decade after her stories but well before the majority of her novels, delivers an unambiguously negative sermon on silence, variously described as "vizio," "peccato" and even "una malattia mortale" (858). Silence, we are told, is the poison of our age, manifesting itself in two ways: the silence in ourselves (a consequence of ... per ii nostro

stesso

"una

violenta antipatia

essere" 857) and the silence we share with others (in the absence of any

"libero e normale rapporto fra gli uomini"). In tones which grow increasingly sententious as the essay progresses, silence comes to be judged in exclusively moral terms: "una forma d'infelicita chiusa. mostruosa., diabolica" (859), an obstacle formed out of mendacity and fear which has to be overcome if we are ever to exchange "qualche libera parola" amongst ourselves (858). It is an essay whose central message is clearly felt: contrary to a whole tradition of thought which has praised silence as the preservation of an enigma (St Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard., Wittgenstein), Ginzburg insists on a moral obligation inside us to break such silence.

Reticence, once the

ultimate form of respect for the Mystery of the Almighty and - in more secular times - an ex'Pression of one's authenticity, becomes inhibitive, unhealthy, regressive in Ginzburg's eyes, a mode of being "diabolicamente infelice" (859). There are two reasons why, after spending some time with Ginzburg's fiction, her essay on silence acquires a faint but very definite irony. The first reason is purely aesthetic: the power of Ginzburg's prose and the peculiar atmospheres of her stories lie precisely in the very reticence she considers so unhealthy. A man and a woman sitting on a bus, a mother smokjng a cigarette in the darkness of her children's bedroom, a sister reading through her brother's old love Ieuers ... silence beautifies the images in Ginzburg's stories, investing an otherwise banal sequence of events in the everyday life of a bored bourgeoisie with haunting significance. Of course, Ginzburg is not the first writer to benefit from such lacunae in her stories - Pinter and Hemingway spring most inunediately to mind as manipulators of the unspoken. In contrast to the silences found in "The Killers" and The Birthday Party, however, Ginzburg's silences emanate sadness rather than menace, and seem to foreshadow an inuninent disillusionment rather than any act of gratuitous violence. In the silence of Ginzburg's narrators this is most clearly felt; narra tors who simply relate, in a simple, almost journalistic indiretto, the gestures, speech and actions of those around them, unhindered by personal comment or elaborate digressions.

Almost all of Ginzburg's

narrators (Valentino, Sagitlario, Lessico Famigliare, "Mfo Marito") have this relaxed. melancholy tone, spartan in adjectives, averse to esagerazione, forever outlining at a pensive, unemotional pace the lighting of a cigarette, the buffed exit of a character, the silent erasure of a cherished expectation. The moment in Valentino, for example, when the attractive son brings home his short, fat. rich .jidanzata to meet the family - ajidanzata, moreover, almost ten years his senior is narrated tersely and with little interjection from the narrator: La fidanzata acccse Wla sigaretta c comincio a parlare. Parlava con la voce di chi e abituato a

28

e ogni cosa che ci diceva pareva che ci desse un comando. Disse che voleva bene a Valentino e aveva fiducia in Jui; aveva fiducia che la smettesse di giocare col gatto e fare giocattoli E disse che lei aveva moltissimi soldi e cosl potevan.o sposarsi senza aspettare che Valentino guadagnasse. Era sola e libera perche i suoi genitori CTlllO l morti e non aveva bisogno di render conto a ness uno di quel cbe faceva. D'improvviso mia mad.re si misc a piangere. Fu un momento un po' penoso e non si sapeva bene cosa fare. (221) dare dei comandi

"There is nothing" writes Walter Benjamin, "that commends a story to memory more effectively than that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis."'

Ginzburg's

masterly use of the indirect - a style already precociously mature in ''La Madre" -- eschews the needless recording of impressions and instead allows our imaginations to construct the scene for ourselves: the self-assured arrogance of wealth amongst frugality, the incongruity of the couple as they sit together in the family living room, the stifled sobs of the mother's crushed hopes breaking embarrassingly into thefldanzata's monologue. Another reason for perceiving an unintended irony in Ginzburg's vilification of silence lies surely i n the fact that. for all their impotence and passivity, Ginzburg's protagonists yearn for peace, a motif in Ginzburg forever coupled with images of silence and death. The suicide of the mother in "La Madre" provokes the children to recall her own words on the possibility of an afterlife:

aneva detto che non r!c ii Paradiso, con gli angioletti e con la bella musica, ma da morti si va in un posto dove non si sta ne bene ne male, e dove non si desidera nulla, e siccome non si desidera nulla ci si riposa e si sta molto in pace. (214) La madre Wl8 volta

Death here being a state which, if not the most desirable form of silence, is certainly the most absolute. Sagittario ends on a similar note with the death of Giulia, whose silent. ever-present smile never leaks a word throughout the entire novel.

The mother, left by the side of her

daughter's deathbed, finally see ms to understand the truth of the smile (and, implicitly, her silence):

mia madre capiva il senso di quel sorriso. Era ii sorriso di chi vuol esse re lasciato in disparte, per ritomare poco a poco nelJ'ombra. (666)

Adesso

Silence here, far from any sense of "chiusa, mostruosa, diabolica" unhappiness, actually seems to suggest a gentle, if somewhat lugubrious haven. A dim refuge of greyness where one can finally escape the noise of the world. the chatter of one's peers, the gossip of one's village. So

many of Ginzburg's characters seem to be involved in this Sartrean flight from the hell of other people, one might be forgiven for suspecting something of this desire for peace in the writer herself. Her 1961 essay on England ("EJogio e compianto dell'Inghilterra") reflects this to some extent From the very first line ("L'Inghilterra e bella e malinconica") Ginzburg's anitude towards England proves to be as ambiguous as her thoughts on the melancholy, solitude and silence she associates with it

L'Inghilterra c un paese dove si resta assolutamentc quello che si c . L'anima non si libero dci suoi ..

vizi, e neppure ne assume di nuovi. Allo stesso modo dell'erba, l'anima si culla in silenzio nella sua verdeggiante solitudine, abbeverata da una ticpida pioggia. (812) The England Ginzburg presents is an ordered realm of perfect stasis, inhabited by melancholy, slightly timid creatures who lack imagination, imbibe endless amounts of tea and live

29

"come in un etemo esilio, sognando allri cieli" (811). It is difficult to know whether Ginzburg is

attracted or repelled by this all-pervading tristezza of the English. The title becomes uncertain is this a praise or a lament of "ii piu malinconico paese del mondo" (805)? Is Ginzburg describing a culture affiicted by a case of terminal despair (in contrast to her own country, where on the street even trees and flowers bloom "scaturiti dall'allegria della terra")? Or is she rather projecting upon a version of Angl9-Saxon seriousness images of melancholy, silence and frustrated dreams of "allri cieli" which, far from being exclusively English, actually lie closer to the worlds of her own fiction? Her description of English conversations do seem to nudge us in this direction: Non c'e difatti nulla di pili lriste a l mondo d'una conversazione inglese, sempre assor ta a non sfiorare nulla d'essenziale, ma a fennarsi in superficie. Per non ofen f dere iJ prossimo, penetrando nella sua intimitA, thee sacra, la conversazione inglese ronza su argomenli di estrema noia per tutti. purchC siano senza pericolo.

(809)

Such observations could equally be well applied to any of the conversations in Famiglia or

Borghesia, conversations which Giovanni Raboni has rightly attributed to "quella piccola, disperata musica della mondanitA."' Ginzburg knows this well enough - in "Silenzio" she writes: Per pagine e pagine, i nostri personaggi si scainbiano delle osservazioni insignilicanti,

ma caricbe

d'una desolata tristezza: "Hai freddo?" "No, non ho freddo." "Vuoi un po' di te?" "Grazie, no�. ... I

i

nostri personaggi parlano cosi. Parlano cos! per ingannare ii s lenzio. (855)

What Ginzburg perceives to be the English fear of silence is actually the same fear which dominates most of her fiction - the fear of saying what we really feel.

Adopting popular

stereotypes of English "seriousness" and Italian "allegria," one could begin to speculate endlessly

here: did Ginzburg find in England precisely what was so un-Italian in her own work? Was she shocked, perhaps even secretly delighted, by the pervasive, almost "public" diffusion of melancholy she found there - a melancholy she had always assumed to be the most private and elusive of sentiments? Like Giulia in Sagiltario and the single mother in "La Madre," did she finally stumble upon that moribund sense of pace so many of her fictional characters seem to yearn for?

The essay on England ends, naturally enough, in a graveyard ("Vi sono bellissimi

cimiteri, semplicemente pietre scritte, sparse nell'erba in una profonda pace." 812). After several pages of increasingly negative images concerning the English and the sheep-like stupidity of their shop-assistants, the desolation of their cafes, the uneatability of their food, the lacklustre conformity of their dress sense and the contagious nature of their national "lristezza," Ginzburg attempts to recompense for all of th.is with Ille reasonable enough suggestion that England. if not the most attractive place to live, is at least a pleasant enough place to die. English cemelries sono IA, in perpetua intimita con la vita. eppure immerse in una pace supreme. Net pacse dells malinconia, ii pensiero e sempre rivolto alla morte.

Non teme la morte,

assomigliando l'ombra dells morte alla vasta ombra degli alberi, al silenzio cbe e gia prcsente nell'anima, perduta net suo verde sonno. (813)

If melancholy really is, as Adriano Seroni has said. "the prime characteristic of Ginzburg's fiction,"' then her fascination with England becomes more understandable. The image from the passage has a faintly Neoplatonic ring to it; the silence which is "already in our own soul" is finally reunited with the far deeper silence of the grave. The reader almost feels him/herself slide to the end of the essay, as the finaJ paragraphs exhale themselves on a strangely morbid note of

30

calm. The bright. green, sun-filled silence of the English ccmete.ry is, after all, Ginzburg's finaJ understanding of peace - silence understood as the distancing and ultimate cessation of the noise of life, the final station (to continue the Neoplatonic metaphor) before the much yearned-for union with the Nothingness. The same "nulla" which both "La Madre" and Giulia in Sogillarlo spend their unhappy lives waiting for. The silent characters in most of Ginzburg's fiction, however - Walter in "Casa al Marc," the husband of "Mio Marita," Ippolito in Tutti I nostri ler i, Tommasino in Le voci de/la sera -

" (813).

disscminale an air of reticence which has little to do with "una pace suprema

Significantly, male reticence in Ginzburg seems to involve silences of mendacity, uncertainty or indifference, as opposed to female silences of disappoinbnent and wlnerability.

Tommasino

offers the clearest and most convincing example of the Ginzburg Male - taciturn, brooding, uncertain, solitary: ll Tonunasino mangia da solo, col libro appoggiato al bicchicre. Viene a fargli da mangiare la Betta, la contaditia.

ll Tommasino si mcttc scduto in poltrona col libro. vicino al lume. "Cosi solo , povero cuorc,• dice la Betta. "Dovresti prenderti una bella m ogli e. Sci ricco, sci hello,. sei giovane, e qui al paese c'c tantc ragazz.e, belle, riccbe, buone, che ti aspettano tanto. • (732) The garrulous Betta. like most of Ginzburg's garrulous characters, only serves to highlight Tommasino's infrangible silence. A silence which signifies not so much an absence of energy as a re-direction of it: Tommasino is silent because he is simply not interested enough in reality to talk about it

Be it "la Betta" or the "tante ragazz.e" who wait for him in the village, the cause of

Tommasino's reticence lies in the richness of his privacy - as if the development of one's own interiority must necessarily be at the expense of a "libero e nonnale rappono fra gli uomini" (857). Poetic silence and healthy interaction with those around us cannot go hand in hand - which is where the paradox of Ginzburg's writings bcoomes most clearly visible: the essay s condemn precisely that which gives the stories their power. The absence of communication, of explication, of clarification which Ginzburg considers so "monstrous" and "diabolical" is, ironically, the poeticizing motif of her fiction. Ginzburg's characters (her fretting mothers, her broken fathers, her brooding males, her melancholy, disillusioned narrators) stay with us long after we have finished reading her books because they say so little. The cause of their unhappiness within the novel is the reason for their longevity outside it

Of course, all silence constitutes an absence, an absence of language - but in Ginzburg's fiction it is a lamentable absence, a cowardly absence, an absence which should be filled but never quite is. In Levoci, Tonunasino confesses to the narrator the silence he has kept with her has been nothing more than a symbol for his own cowardice: Stiamo quasi sempre zitti, ora, insieme.

Ce ne stiamo quasi sempre ziui, perch6 abbiamo

cominciato a sotterrnre i noslri pensieri, bene in fondo,

bene in fondo dentro di noi. Poi, quando

riprenderemo a parlare, dircmo solo delte cose inutili.

- Prima, - disse, - mi veniva a dirti tutto qucllo che mi passava per l a testa. Ora non piu.. Ora mi c sparita la voglia di raccontarti le cose. Quello che vado pensando lo racconto un poco a me stesso, e poi lo sottem>. Po� a poco a poco, non raccontcrO nenuneno piu niente a me stesso. Sottem:ro tutto subito, ogni vago pensicro. prima ancora che prcnda fonna. 3I

- Ma questo, - di.ssi. - vuol dire essere infelicc. - Non c'e dubbio, - disse, - vuol dire essere molto infelice. Ma succede a tanta di quella gente. Una persona, a un certo momento. non vuole piu vedcre in faccia la propria anima. Perche ha pe:ura, se la guarda in Caccia, di non trovare phi ii coraggio di vi vere. (766-7) Tommasino's silence is mendacious only insofar as he has nothing to say, bnt cannot bring himself to say this to the nanator. If conversation is seen as an expression of one's inwardness, it is an inwardness which Tommasino clearly does not wish to see. In both "Casa al Mare" and "Mio Marito," an abyss of i.ndifference towards those around them makes up the male silences in these stories, hence their strange, stilted annospheres, their brief, difficult conversations, their unashamedly Chekhovian overtones (particularly the ending of "Mio Marito," where in the flush of the nanator's happiness the doctor shoots himself in his study over the death of the young girl).

In "Casa al Mare", Walter's almost stoic sense of apatheia towards life cannot even be pierced by the various infidelities of his wife.

"Non soffro per qucsto," we learn in the closing pages, "tu

polessi capirc come tutto mi e lontanol

Neppur io so quello che voglio" (185).

The word

'reticence' implies, etymologically, that something is retained or kept back in reserve - but here the only thing unexpressed is the fact that these characters have nothing to express. Walter, the doctor, Tommasino ... such characters offer what arc probably the most nihilistic moments in Ginzburg's fiction. "Nihilistic" because the nihil which lies beneath their impassivity is genuine - theirs is not the embanassed inarticulateness of one who is fumbling for "the right thing to say," or the wordlessness of one who knows a secret but is afraid to tell. Their silences cover neither love nor shame, nor even a contrary truth, but simply a void. Ginzburg's silences are not the silences of negative theology, which reflect the in.commensurable richness of God- nor are they the silences of KaJlca's Sirens, whose silence (we are told) is a more powerful weapon than

their song; rather, such silenzl in Gin:zburg are the acknowledgments of a singular truth, versions of which appear at various moments throughout her writings. and which in one case has produced (stylistically) her finest paragraph: C'e

una ccrta monotona uniformita nei destini degli uomini.

Le nostrc

esistenzc si svolgono

secondo leggi antiche ed immutabili, secondo una loro cadenza unifonne ed antica. I sogni non si avvcrano mai e non appena Ii vecliamo spc:zz.ati, comprendiamo a

un tratto che le gioie maggiori

delta nostra vita sono fuori dells realtA. Non appena li vediamo spezza ti, ci struggiamo di nostalgia per ii tempo cbe fervevano

in noi. La nostra sorte trascorre in questa

vicenda di

speranza

c di

nostalgia. (792) It is a strangely Proustian moment - one thinks inunediately of the young Marcel, who

refuses to envisage the love letter he is expecting for fear that his speculations, once made, will never take place in reality.

Of course Ginzburg, writing in an essay about her time spent in a

remote village in Abruzzo, is actually referring to the death of her husband. imprisoned and executed by the fascist authorities shortly after their return. Even if one can ignore the poignantly biographical clement. one can still sec how Ginzburg's earlier idea of a second, deeper silence with oneself relates exactly to the sense of resignation in the passage. Such silences come when one no longer hopes or dreams, because (like the young Marcel) one has understood U1e deeper truth about such sognl and speranze - that they are inversely proportional to reality. For an unfortunate few silence, evidently, is the only response available to such a void.

32

Which is why, perhaps, Ginzburg so often links silence to images of suicide and peace - to

one suicide in particular. In her essay on silence, Ginzburg remarks how "alcuni di noi si sono ammazzati per [iJ silenzio]" (858).

The allusion to Pavese is gentle but unmistakable.

Cesare

Pavese, Ginzburg's close friend and colleague (they had worked together in Turin for the publisher Einaudi), took his own life in 1950. at the age of forty-two.

Probably one of the most

accomplished Italian novelists from the post-war period, his suicide - like that of Primo Levi's shook everyone.

We encounter him near the end of the autobiographical Lessico Famigliare,

where Ginzburg describes his pipe and his annchair, the ironic audience he always gave to their observations, his fear of uncertainty and immoderate misanthropy.

In the 1957 essay "Ritratto

d'un amico," however, Ginzburg gives her most detailed reflections on Pavese, who remains unnamed throughout

It is an essay which bristles with all the classic motifs of a Ginzburg

landscape: Turin already has all the characteristics which Ginzburg, seven years later, will attribute to London - "tristezz.a", "malinconia'', "nebbia", even the same "odore di stazione e And Pavese, described

fuliggine" which she finds on the Underground (797-8).

in

these pages,

seems to take on all the characteristics of a Tommasino or a Walter - a lonesome, eccentric figure who moved "nel mondo arido e solitario dei sogni" (799); like Tommasino, Pavese had the habit of "attorcigli[are] intomo alle dita le ciocche dei suoi capeUi" (798, 734); like Tommasino, he wandered about the city on his own, "col suo lungo passo, testardo e solitario" (798, 734); even the habit of reading a book. in an armchair, under a lamp, are the same (732, 1097). Like Tommasino, Pavese was tonured by silence, a silence which stayed with bim even in tbe company of friends: Qualche volta, In sern, ci veniva a trovare; sedeva pallido, con la sua

sciarpetta

al

collo, e

si

attorcigliava i capelli ... non pronunciava, in tut.ta la sera, una sola parola; non rispondeva a nesslDUl delle nostre domande. In fine. di scatto, agguantava

ii

cappotto e se

nc

andava. Umiliati, noi ci

cbiedevarno se la nostra compagnia l'aveva deluso ... o se invece si era proposto. semplicemente, di passare una serata in silenzio sotto una lampada che non

fosse la sua. (800)

It is no triviali?.ation of Ginzburg's sentiments towards Pavese to say that, for the half-dozen pages of her essay. Pavese becomes a character from a Ginzburg novel. His irony, idiosyncrasies, enjgmatic reticence and studied misanthropy invest him with an aura which supersedes the merely biographical.

Pavese's taciturnity becomes something more than a simple character trait: it

becomes the emblem for a profound disbelief in Uie possibility of hwnan dialogue.

Pavese's

reportedly pathological fear of a future war (at least as Ginzburg herself would have us believe, I 100) bears this out in part -- giving an individual conviction of solipsism an international expression. When we think of lhe silences in negative theology, in the work of mystics such as Meister Eckhart, the calm of Ginzburg's novels becomes even more haunting.

Silence is not just a

consequence of God's ineffability ("Therefore the ancient masters preferred silence to lies"), even though this is its primary significance. For Eck.hart, our silences are the best ways of e.''Pressing our urunediated love for God: "The third reason [the soul does not name God) is that it does not have enough time to name Him.

It cannot tum away long enough from love."10

RaU1er than

conveying our feelings. words obstructs U1em. In most mysticisms, silence constitutes one of the last stations before union with the One; language becomes inadequate to describe t11e relationship

33

between knower and Known. words can express.

"Alone with the alone," a divine love is encountered which no

In such mysticisms, reticence is the consequence of an infinitely

incommensurable experience. Ginzburg's silences, as we have said, are not the product of any "love mysticism," even though we could not appreciate them without such traditions. Far from concealing some infinite inexpressibility, Ginzburg's silences conceal an infinite emptiness; if anything lends her bare, unadorned novels their enigmatic riclmess, it is our own theological habit of perceiving a silence to be something "unsaid." Our insistence on understanding a pause to be a reservation, an interval to be an omission, when all such silences really are is the absence of anything to say. In "Ritratto d'Wl arnico," we never hear the "arnico" speak. He is a figure more talked about

than talking, a character like so many of Ginzburg's characters, tyrannically consigned to a cold, uninformative terza persona, without ever being given a voice to speak for tl1emselves. Ginzburg's tyranny over her characters works because it is an intelligent tyranny , the tyranny of the novelist who has understood the appalling necessity of an aestl1etic of reLicence. Perhaps the example Natalia Ginzburg offers literature - the example of a novelist who profited, artistically, from the very silences she purported to lament - is neither rare nor reproachable. It captivates because it talces place with no ostentation; no theoretical declarations of intent, no self­ congratulatory listings of predecessors, no constant prods to Lhe reader to admire what she is

Just tlle appalling calm of two people, sitting together in a

doing.

room, saying absolutely

notlling.

Bosphorus University, Istanbul

IAN ALMOND

NOTES

1Alan Bullock. Natalia Glnzburg (St. Martin's Press, 1991). p. 64.

2John Gan Runcr in Peter Brand and Lino Penile, eds., Cambridg11 Hwary of Italian L1t11rature (Cambridge 1996), p. S49.

University Pmss,

>sbaron Wood, /ta/Jan Women 1Vr111ng (Manchester: Manchester University Pte$$, 1993), p. 6. 4Sharon Wood, /talfan Women's Wrmng 1860-1994 (London: Alhlonc Press, 199S), p. 136. s

Cluistopher Cairns, ltalfon L111ra111re: The Dominant Themes (David and Charles, 1977), p. 167.

'All

quotations, unless stated otherwise, arc taken from Natalia Giniburg. Opere (Milan: Mondadori.

I986) vol I -

�efa.ce by Cesare GarbolL 1 /llummations, trans. HAIT)' Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), p, 90.

'To be found ln "Tunolibri: 24 Deccmb�.

1977 ·-cit. in Natalia Ginzburg. Famiglia (Einaudi, 199S), p. 121.

'Adriano Seroni, Esperimen11 Crltlcl sul Novu:ento /111terarfo (Milan, 1967), p. 83. 10Reiner SchOrmann, Melstir Eckhart (Bloomington: Indiana Univcrsitv PrC$S, 1978), p. I 2S - talcen from Ecldw1's sermon Mulier. VC1nlt hara 111nunc1111.