Things We Used to Say Paperback - 1997

Name: Things We Used to Say (Carcanet Fiction)
Price: 29.22 GBP
Availability: InStock
Author: Ginzburg, Natalia
ISBN: 9781857542936

by Natalia Ginzburg

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From the rear cover

Here is a new translation of a classic of Italian literature, The Things We Used to Say asks to be read as fiction, though the author, one of Italy's finest contemporary novelists, admitted that it is highly autobiographical: "It should be read without asking more or less of it than a novel can give." In it she turns a novelist's devastatingly observant eye on her parents, her siblings, and her own childhood and youth to produce a ruthless, comic, and intimate portrait of a family living through dangerous times. The book spans the period from the rise of fascism through World War II (in which her husband perished at the hands of the Nazis) and its aftermath. Natalia Ginzburg purported to be only a witness, a seismograph, a recording angel. Woven around the inconsequential, revealing remarks that are repeated in a family until they become its affectionate private code, rich in memory and association, this is one of the rare true evocations of a family in modern literature. The Things We Used to Say is at the same time a living history that documents the life of the assimilated Jewish Ginzburg family and the culture to which they belonged.