All Our Yesterdays

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Gradually, from the hectic and comical jostling of family life in the opening chapters, a protagonist begins to emerge: the widower’s youngest daughter Anna. Pressburger doesn’t make us want Braun to succeed exactly, but he expertly ramps up the tension so we simply must find out which deserved outcome lies ahead, as Braun gets closer to escaping Europe and justice and simultaneously learns more about how close they are to catching him. The war effort pursued in the armed forces by my maternal grandfather, and in the civil service by my paternal grandfather – a quaker, and therefore a ‘conchie’, or conscientious objector – and by both my grandmothers, who each had to sign the Official Secrets Act to perform their roles, was against a combination of an ideology and a group of nations in the form of the Axis powers. No, I haven’t read Family Lexicon yet, but it’s great to hear that you rate it so highly as I definitely want to get to it.

ELNet is both an online and physical gathering place for sharing content and discussion, with the goal of encouraging the promotion, professionalism and popularity of European literature in the UK. We are introduced to our protagonist Anna whose father, an ageing widower, is moody, temperamental, and a staunch anti-Fascist engrossed in composing his memoir most notably his harsh views on Fascism.As readers, we understand and love the novel’s characters in all their humanity – and for a moment or two, their courage seems to illuminate, in a flash of radiance, the meaning of human life. The main characters just undergo what is happening, barely understand what is going on, have no control over their lives. Tenía además mucha curiosidad por leer a Ginzburg, a quien seguiré leyendo, porque tiene algo propio, y quiero saber si todos sus libros van en este tono o si cambia en otros. But even now the style remains sober and business-like, in a continuous stream of relatively short sentences, descriptive, without dialogues, and again with subdued emotion; not even when really dramatic things happen towards the end of the war. The pensione is bombed, and concerned to save a large quantity of towels, she doesn’t reach the air-raid shelter in time: ‘she had been swept away in the collapse of the staircase together with a large suitcase, in which were these towels.

Even the one older girl who is most attractive and has boys waiting outside the gate for her to come out (her father won’t let them in the house) is too small in her bosom and too big in her hips and thighs. The war ended a year later, when Ginzburg was still in her 20s, a widowed mother of three small children.

The Glass Pearls, his second novel, is less innovative structurally than his screen work: it’s a fairly straight suspense story. She was alone with Giuma’s face that gave her a stab of pain at her heart, and every day she would be going back with Giuma amongst the bushes on the river bank, every day she would see again that face with the rumpled forelock and the tightly closed eyelids, that face that had lost all trace both of words and of thoughts for her.

But in a short time he would be giving up the newspaper and leaving Rome for good, because he did not know how to produce newspapers. But now she has a child, and has been taken to wait out the war in Cenzo Rena’s home in a remote village.

Having been scattered across the country, and Europe, by the upheaval of war, the final scene sees the survivors regather and reflect on the recent past – ‘thinking of all those who were dead, and of the long war and the sorrow and noise and confusion’. Unsurprisingly, there is an eccentric cook/housekeeper here too, a rather foolish woman referred to as La Maschiona, whose devastating actions drive the novel’s denouement.

The adolescent Anna is mystified by these developments: are Emanuele and Danilo both in love with her sister? The victors, on the other hand, were left, quite naturally, with a sense – for better or worse – that they very much did know how to take on the future.As personal relationships in these families are forged and fragmented, the Germans continue their irrepressible march across Europe, advancing into Belgium and Holland – and then France. her words seemed to express something completely true about my experience of living, and about life. I would like to address myself in particular to other readers who are right now awaiting, whether they know it or not, their first and special meeting with her work. The daughter of the middle-class family realizes how pitiful their preparations are and she asks the rich neighbors if she can shelter in their basement when necessary. I’ve read quite a few of Ginzburg’s novels/novellas over the last few years, but this feel like the one I’ve been hoping to find – major-league stuff, especially given its scope and setting.