Two novellas about family life and fraudsters by one of the twentieth
century's best Italian novelists.
Valentino and Sagittarius are two of Natalia Ginzburg's most
celebrated works: tales of love, hope, and delusion that are full of her
characteristic mordant humor, keen psychological insight, and
unflinching moral realism.
Valentino is the spoiled child of doting parents, who have no doubt that
their handsome young son will prove "a man of consequence." Nothing that
Valentino does--his nights out on the town, his failed or incomplete
classes--suggests there is any ground for that confidence, and
Valentino's sisters view their parents and brother with a mixture of
bitterness, stoicism, and bemusement. Everything becomes that much more
confused when, out of the blue, Valentino finds an enterprising,
wealthy, and strikingly ugly wife, who undertakes to support not just
him but the whole family.
Sagittarius is another story of misplaced confidence recounted by a
wary daughter, whose mother, a grass widow with time on her hands, moves
to the suburbs, eager to find new friends. Brassy, bossy, and
perpetually dissatisfied, especially when it comes to her children, she
strikes up a friendship with the mysterious Scilla, and soon the two
women are planning to open an art gallery. But knowing better than
everyone, it turns out, is not that different from knowing nothing at
all.
