All Our Yesterdays

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Ginzburg has written a truly remarkable novel here, a story of ordinary people living through extraordinary times, beautifully told with a warmth and generosity of spirit that reflects the Italian character. It really gives a sense of how it must have felt to be on the fringes of war, the tension and uncertainty as the conflict edges ever closer. Their relationship is touched by tragedy and grace as the events of their life in the countryside run parallel to the war and the encroaching threat of fascism – and in their wake, a society dealing with anxiety and grief. At forty-seven, Cenzo Rena seems like an unlikely match for Anna, but he is kind, thoughtful and generous – qualities to be admired irrespective of his appearance.

Todos os Nossos Ontens" é um livro belíssimo, em que as histórias de diferentes famílias se cruzam, ao longo de anos, tendo como pano de fundo a Itália de Mussolini e a Segunda Guerra Mundial. All Our Yesterdays, then, is another superb novel by Ginzburg; a seamless blend of the personal with the global, where the comparatively smaller dilemmas of families and relationships can be as debilitating and crushing to individuals as the bigger, large-scale dramas of politics, war and violence. She was alone, she was alone and no one said anything to her, she was alone in her room with her grass-stained, crumpled dress and her violently trembling hands. Y todo esto contado con una enorme calidad literaria que hace de esta novela una lectura muy grata y profunda. Ginzburg is a unique voice and there’s a direct simplicity prose that makes her dry observations all the more riveting.The final lines of the book see the survivors ‘thinking … of the long, difficult life which they saw in front of them now, full of all the things they did not know how to do’. The book focuses on two Italian families living opposite one another in a small Northern Italian town, with the story opening in the late 1930s during the run-up to war. Even toddlers in her novel are angry or manipulative or silent and so are all the adults flawed – in personality and in appearance. As the novel unfolds, Anna – the youngest daughter in the middle-class family – gradually emerges as the main protagonist, an ordinary, impressionable teenager alert to developments around her.

By the war’s end, Natalia was in her late twenties, a widow with three young children and a debut novella under her belt.I’ve read a lot of translations of Italian novels set during the war and it seems to me this is the perfect book to learn what life was like in Italy during WW II. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without written permission from this blog’s author is prohibited. All Our Yesterdays, Ginzburg’s third novel, was originally published in Italian under the title Tutti i nostri ieri in 1952. A daughter who is secretly pregnant (but unmarried) dreams (almost hopes) that she and her unborn baby will be killed by the Germans. While Anna’s older sister Concettina – an attractive girl who bemoans her flat chest – works her way through a sequence of fiancés, her brother, Ippolito, helps their father by typing up his memoirs late into the night.

Guima, unsurprisingly, turns out to be a coward with no inclination of assuming any responsibility and Anna is in despair. This powerful novel, set against the background of Italy from 1939 to 1944, from the anxious months before the country entered the war, through the war years, to the Allied victory with it trailing wake of anxiety, disappointment, and grief. As you say, the messiness is a clue – funnily enough, it’s a common characteristic in pretty much everything I’ve read by Ginzburg, which suggests that much of her writing was inspired by lived experience. But it is also a novel about family and relationships – individuals grappling with their insecurities on a personal level, struggling to adapt to larger events beyond their control, and the inability of members of the same family to communicate and connect during moments of immense upheavals particularly in their private lives. To this day I can’t be sure when or how they died – he refused to discuss it, just as he refused to take part in any form of remembrance ceremony.The boys are particularly aware of these developments, knowing full well that Italy will likely align itself with Nazi Germany. The great emotional power of this novel springs from the depth and truth of each one of its characters. mesa o pai esfregava as mãos e dizia que se houvesse Deus o deixaria viver até ao fim do fascismo, para poder publicar o seu livro e ver as caras das pessoas.

Ginzburg pone su mirada de narradora en Anna, la más pequeña de una familia de cuatro hijos cuya madre ha fallecido. Ginzburg thus provides us with a simple explanation for the book’s title – these yesterdays belong to this group of friends. In novels written by authors who experienced the war there's never any trace of the melodrama and sentimentality which constitutes the foundation (and selling point) of so many contemporary WW2 novels.All Our Yesterdays is among the great novels of its century, and Ginzburg among the great novelists. To save her reputation, she marries an eccentric older family friend, Cenzo Rena, and they move to his village in the south. He would do better to come back behind the counter and weigh things on his little pair of scales again. We are also introduced to the rather colourful character Cenzo Rena, an older friend of the family rumoured to be rich with his own house and estate in Italy’s rural south.