Two novellas about domestic life, isolation, and the passing of time
by one of the finest Italian writers of the twentieth century.
Carmine, an architect, and Ivana, a translator, lived together long ago
and even had a child, but the child died, and their relationship fell
apart, and Carmine married Ninetta, and their child is Dodò, who Carmine
feels is a little dull, and these days Carmine is still spending every
evening with Ivana, but Ninetta has nothing to say about that. Family,
the first of these two novellas from the 1970s, is an examination, at
first comic, then progressively dark, about how time passes and life
goes on and people circle around the opportunities they had missed,
missing more as they do, until finally time is up.
Borghesia, about a widow who keeps acquiring and losing the Siamese
cats she hopes will keep her company in her loneliness, explores similar
ground, along with the confusions of feeling and domestic life that came
with the loosening social strictures of the 1970s. "She remembered
saying that there were three things in life you should always refuse,"
thinks one of Natalia Ginzburg's characters, beginning to age out of
youth: "Hypocrisy, resignation, and unhappiness. But it was impossible
to shield yourself from those three things. Life was full of them and
there was no holding them back."
