| Author/Contributor(s): | Lenarduzzi, Thea |
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Date: | 06/29/2027 |
| Binding: | Hardcover |
| Condition: | NEW |
The first English-language biography of the incomparably influential modern Italian writer, written with the narrative sweep and fluidity of a historical epic.
Those who have seen houses collapse know too clearly what fragile possessions are vases of flowers, paintings, white walls. They know too well what a house is made of . . . Behind the serene flower vases, behind the teapots, the rugs, the waxed floors, there is the other true face of the house, the atrocious face of the collapsed house.
One of the most original postwar Italian writers, Natalia Ginzburg (1916–1991) is perhaps best known for her novels Family Lexicon and The Dry Heart, which are read and adored with uncommon devotion today.
With the sweep of an epic novel, Thea Lenarduzzi’s Collapsing Houses offers a rich, complex narrative, a kind of collective consciousness that builds a composite portrait of Ginzburg, reminiscent of the multi-perspective experiments of her own books. We follow Ginzburg from her youth in Turin; to her marriage to the Italian anti-fascist resistance hero Leone Ginzburg, who was murdered in the war; through the postwar period when she found herself, at the age of twenty-eight, a widow, without house and home, unable to get her bearings. Examining the rise of antisemitism in twentieth-century Italy, Mussolini’s rise and fall, and the devastation wrought by World War II, Lenarduzzi offers a rich portrait of the writer and her time, continuing past her early years and growing literary fame, through time spent in London, Rome, and Palermo, and her activism and political involvement in later life.
In Collapsing Houses we meet Ginzburg the writer, the editor, the friend, mother, wife, daughter. “Dear Natalia,” wrote her close friend Cesare Pavese, teasingly, affectionately, “stop having children and write a book that is better than mine.” She didn’t stop having children, but she took up his challenge. Ginzburg wrote not despite family life but because of and about it, capturing in precise prose the Technicolor truth of its contradictions and complications, mundanities and fleeting pleasures. Her honesty, the clarity and truth of her minimalist language, its resistance to fashion and explicit ideology, have redefined the possibilities of the novel as a form.