Swen Steinhäuser

I have been reading three books by the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991). Ginzburg was already on my radar when I came across a thin blue copy of The Little Virtues displayed amongst a small assemblage of books in Eleanor Morgan’s exhibition ‘Tales of the frozen bits’ at Castlefield Gallery, Manchester. In resonance with Morgan’s video works, the books were assembled according to the form, genre and method of memoir at work within them.

I have always been fascinated by the gestures of collecting, ordering, assembling and relaunching, such as a small number of found literary works, in thrall to the impulse to constellate and to list for the pleasure of grounding the self and its projects amidst a personal history of reading, whether jotted in the iterable secrecy of a notebook or more readily exposed in some available public setting or other. Thinking about this impulse to constellate and publicly share today, I am reminded of a surreal night I spent in a small bar in the company of Christian T., an old school friend and student of the Humanities at Goethe Universität Frankfurt at the time, in which we experienced the comic and endearing strangeness of dancing to a DJ who would intermittently interrupt his set to pick up an annotated copy of a book laid out on a small table next to his decks and energetically begin to shout out passages of philosophy from Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida and others, sending the cramped bar full of students of politics, philosophy and art into a wild, drunken, half-ironic frenzy, overtaken in turns by feelings of bemusement, bewilderment, hilarity, recognition and belonging.

Out of the four books on display in Morgan’s exhibition, one I had already read: Pond, by Claire Louis Bennet (Fitzcerraldo, 2015). I had loved Bennet’s book for its highly strung prose detailing fragments of a solitary everyday amongst things and matter suspended in the intervals of absent narratives, unabashedly adrift in the details of a bewildering mundane, from drawn-out contemplations of arrangements of fruit and vegetables on the windowsill to the best ways of eating porridge in the morning, composed with what Brian Dillon has befittingly called ‘profoundly odd expression’.

Seeing Pond amidst the small assemblage of books, I immediately added the unknown other three to my growing list of future reading, with Ginzburg on top. In a local bookshop with some Ginzburg titles on offer—(but not The Little Virtues) I picked up Happiness, As Such, in a recent edition by Daunt Books, with a foreword by Claire Louise-Bennet. Family Lexicon and The Little Virtues I sought out elsewhere later on.

Today, all three books lie in a pile on my desk, bound in colourful, kaleidoscopically patterned matt card that feels nice to the touch, almost instantly worn. Republished by Daunt Books between 2015 and 2019, but originally published in Italy during the 60s and 70s, some of these titles had been available in English translation for some time, from as early as 1967. Yet by relaunching them today, with introductions by a number of contemporary authors, alongside a long and stellar list of a new wave of endorsements, Ginzburg’s writings seem to truly have been given a new lease of life.

 
The renewed interest in Ginzburg’s afterlife for readers in English seems more than just a clever ploy of marketing in the wake of the recent popularity of fellow Italian writer Elena Ferrante, as some literary commentators have suggested. Instead, Ginzburg’s writings are imbued with a style, tone and sensibility that feels genuinely contemporary. Her insights into the human condition of renewed relevance to our times. That her work has allowed for a whole number of contemporary, predominantly female authors to find traces of their own approaches, styles, themes and ambitions within it, seems testament to the ease with which we can read Ginzburg alongside them.

Her signature matter-of-fact soberness, which is raw and unembellished, leaves the emotional weight of love, loss, grief and longing to simmer, only to occasionally overspill when least expected. An overspilling that takes place, for the most part, not in her characters or narrators, but the body of an empathetic reader, who takes in the facts of sorrowful events and circumstances without narrative suspense or descriptive embellishment to be suddenly touched by the delicate detail of some everyday gesture, like Osvaldo, in Happiness, As Such, putting his hands in his pockets and leaning against the railing of the bridge to watch the sun set.

It is Ginzburg’s sober, unsentimental expression of a deep sensibility of feeling – melancholic and dignified - which above all seems to attract her many contemporary followers, from Maggie Nelson to Deborah Levy to Rachel Cusk. Nelson calls it Ginzburg’s ‘mysterious directness, her salutary ability to lay things bare that never feels contrived or cold, only necessary, honest, clear’.

I wonder how the effect of Ginzburg’s sobriety of style would appear in the original Italian, a language, which to a foreigner’s ears often has the impression of an involuntary speed and drama, holding its speakers in the grip of the undulating melodies of exaggerated passions, with only a minimal regard for the concise economy of discrete sentences marked by a respect for the intervallic lacunas of punctuation. I can’t help but think of an Italian friend, who’s measured, almost enervated English cadence can suddenly transform into a wildly animated frenzy when speaking to his family and friends on the phone - dark tufts of chest-hair bursting through the V-neck of his shirt from one minute to the next. Notwithstanding this obvious caricature of the Italian language, I am keen to better understand the resonance of Ginzburg’s stripped back style within an Italian context. And so, if anything could be said to be missing in this relaunching of her works with contemporary commentaries, it would be an insight into and reflection on the work of their translation.

One thing, in any case, is for certain, Ginzburg reads with ease in English translation. Her prose has little interest, as far as I can tell, to conjure the specificity of a particular place and, for the most part, idiom. Her narratives, characters and settings are traced lightly and float above their context, becoming easy to adopt within another, wherever you might find yourself to be reading. Such ease is aided by Ginzburg’s characters themselves, who always seem to find themselves, even when more or less settled in a particular place, a little uprooted and not quite at home.

Ginzburg depicts the world around her through the melancholic haze of a deep-rooted distrust. Her tone is life-affirming at the limit of utter fragility, always only still able ‘to love the daily current of existence which flows on evenly and apparently without secrets’ (30). Her firm awareness of the imminent possibility of collapse of the fragile foundations upon which the relative security of our lives are built feels palpably rooted in her experiences of war and persecution as a Jewish socialist living under Mussolini and German occupation. It finds its starkest, most poignant expression in her description of the unceasing, incurable, as she repeatedly insists, afterlife of trauma in her essay ‘The Son of Man’:

‘There has been a war and people have seen so many houses reduced to rubble that they no longer feel safe in their own homes which once seemed so quiet and secure. This is something that is incurable and will never be cured no matter how many years go by. True, we have a lamp on the table again, and a little vase of flowers, and pictures of our loved ones, but we can no longer trust any of these things because once, suddenly, we had to leave them behind, or because we have searched through the rubble for them in vain’ (79).

But if melancholy runs deep through Ginzburg’s characters and worlds, it is not English melancholy, as she describes it, which may lull the reader into a trepid sleep, but a melancholy off-set and somewhat sharpened by the sun of a blue mediterranean sky and sudden jolts of explosive laughter. In ‘My Vocation’, Ginzburg recalls the moment when she discovered how people in books should be – funny and at the same time sad (93). And this is precisely what they are, whether invented from scratch or lovingly drawn from memory, not least of all in her memoir Family Lexicon. With all of their faults, ticks, struggles and hardships laid bare, these characters are portrayed with great tenderness and compassion, which imbues their lives with a dignity that cannot fail to be moving.

Ginzburg’s portrayal of her badly tempered, highly opinionated, dominant and obstinate father, who is frequently sent into fits of outrage and disgust with the tastes and behaviours of nearly everyone around him, is a case in point. His constant refrain of insults, which starts out unsympathetically enough, quickly takes on a comic aspect. By the end, against the background of having got to know her father’s own vulnerabilities, innocent passions and bemusing eccentricities, it becomes a source of familiar reassurance, strange comfort and unceasing hilarity. Don’t be such a jackass! Mario is such a jackass! The whole lot of you are jackasses! What jackasses! What a jackass! ‘Alberto is a thug! What a delinquent he is! ‘Thug! Delinquent!’ he said, while Natalina came into the room with the soup. ‘Did you see what a jackass Paola was?’

The unadorned simplicity of Ginzburg’s style, whether in fiction, essay or memoir, invokes a sense of the task of remembrance as an essence of the craft of writing. Far from the monuments to history and fame, it imbues with dignity the lives that were lived and continue to be lived in the margins of public discourses and spaces, remembering not people’s achievements, status and work, or not just, but the singularity of their bearing, the idiosyncracies of their expression, the unique aura of their pleasure and pain.

Reading Ginzburg, I often found myself led back to remembering fragmented scenes from my own life. Like Christian T, smoking on the Regionalbahn—the smell of cigarettes mingling with that of large, freshly printed newspapers unfolded across our laps. The way Chris would hold his cigarettes, dangling from the outstretched fingers of his far-tilted hand, our shared youthful enthusiasm for political organisation, the rough texture of the fabric of our carriage seats.

Although resigned to laying Ginzburg aside for now, with my attention already drawn elsewhere—like Vanessa Onwuemezi’s collection of short stories (or prose poems?) in Dark Neighbourhood or the so-called anti-Ferrante, whatever that might mean, Fleur Jaeggy —I am already looking forward to returning at another time. In the meantime, I savour the promise of a pleasure to come.

Swen Steinhäuser is a writer, gardener, support-worker and bookseller. He lives with his wife and two children in a small terraced house in Manchester, where he gets up early most mornings to write fragments of prose and essay on love, reading, depression and everyday life.