Edited and translated by Lynne Sharon Schwartz
Arguably one of Italy's greatest contemporary writers, Natalia Ginzburg has been best known in America as a writer's writer, quietly loved by her fellow wordsmiths. This collection of personal essays chosen by the eminent American writer Lynne Sharon Schwartz from four of Ginzburg's books written over the course of a lifetime, was a many-years long project for Schwartz. These essays are deeply felt, but also disarmingly accessible. Selected from Le piccole virt, Mai devi domandarmi, and Vita immaginaria, here are autobiographical essays about the life of a writer, motherhood, the hardship of the years immediately following World War II in Italy, and also on searching for an apartment, and starting a new job. Full of self-doubt and searing insight, Ginzburg is merciless in her attempts to describe herself. Paradoxically, her self-deprecating remarks reveal her deeper confidence in her own eye and writing ability.
A Place to Live also includes long excerpts from Serena Cruz o la vera giustizia, the culminating nonfiction work of Ginzburg's career, concerning an infant girl named Serena who was separated from her adoptive parents by the Italian government. The conflict Ginzburg outlines with such force and clarity—humane values vs. bureaucratic rigidity—recently set off a new wave of debate in Italy when the Turin court forbade contact between Serena and her brother.
One of the most renowned and distinctive voices in postwar Italian literature, NATALIA GINZBURG (1916–1991) has been praised for her inimitable style and her unforgettable novels depicting private lives in a disrupted social landscape. A prolific dramatist as well as essayist and novelist, she is best known in this country for her novels All Our Yesterdays, The City and the House, and Voices in the Evening, as well as her autobiographical work The Things We Used to Say, and her biography of the great nineteenth century man of letters Alessandro Manzoni. Ginzburg grew up in Turin and spent most of her adult life in Rome.
Lynne Sharon Schwartz is the author of eight novels, three short story collections, three essay collections, three books of poetry, and three translations from Italian. Among them are the novels Rough Strife (nominated for a National Book Award) and Leaving Brooklyn (nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award in fiction), and the memoirs Ruined by Reading and Not Now, Voyager. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA in fiction and translation, and the New York State Foundation for the Arts. She teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and has taught in many other places both in the US and abroad. Schwartz lives in New York City.
