A Place to Live

May 15, 2002
Italian novelist, dramatist, and essayist Natalia Ginzburg (1916-90) is revered worldwide for the lucidity of her style, the keenness of her perceptions, and the compassion implicit in her humanitarianism. Few of her pristine and powerful personal essays have been available in English, an oversight esteemed writer Lynne Sharon Schwartz rectifies in her graceful, seemingly transparent translations. Schwartz prefaces the collection with a brisk but moving look at Ginzburg's life--her antifascist family; her dissident husband's death in 1944 after being imprisoned by the fascists, which left Ginzburg with three young children; and her devotion to her craft--thus setting the context for Ginzburg's bracing essays about writing, family, home, war, exile, loss, and, in such startlingly incisive musings as "Fantasy Life," the nature of the mind and its evolution over time. Ginzburg draws her readers into her deceptively charming essays with cascades of alluring, everyday detail, then stealthily broaches moral questions of great weight and complexity. Wryly witty, acutely observant, and unfailingly valiant, Ginzburg is a revelation, a spur, and a joy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)