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My first encounter with Natalia Ginzburg was in the epigraph to Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Friend, taken from Ginzburg’s 1975 essay collection The Little Virtues: “And you have to realize that you cannot hope to console yourself for your grief by writing.” I loved the line and its direct address to those who consider art their reward for tragedy. I wanted to read more from her and ordered myself the NYRB reissue of Valentino and Sagittarius: two novellas in one binding—a bargain.
For the yet uninitiated, Ginzburg was a post-war Italian writer—Jewish and Catholic and Communist—who wrote several short, dry-witted novels as well as plays and essays. At the moment, she is experiencing a renaissance of sorts, owing to new translations and reissues of her work. Nunez is not the only contemporary writer enamored with Ginzburg. Indeed, many of our best living writers cite her as inspiration: Rachel Cusk, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sally Rooney, Lydia Davis, Zadie Smith, and Deborah Levy are all among those who have written about her oeuvre, and writer and translator Eric Gudas has even quipped that Americans are stuck in a loop of “reintroducing” Ginzburg. Contributing to the discourse surrounding this lost literary titan is thus a tall order. She is neither embarrassingly famous nor obscure, and yet most of the literature around her work has focused on her more popular works, like The Dry Heart, All Our Yesterdays, or the recently retranslated Family Lexicon. Valentino and Sagittarius have gone relatively unsung, despite their inspired pairing and new introduction by Cynthia Zarin in the NYRB reissue translated by Avril Bardoni. They feature all the traits distinctive to Ginzburg: brusque and exacting prose, domestic subjects and domineering women, a taste for objects and talismans, a penchant for fashioning an inimitable family patois from the simplest turns of phrase, a voice that quietly treads the tragic and the comic, and a dedication to passive female narrators caught telling the story of someone else. It is the last of these that I have found woefully under-analyzed in appraisals of Ginzburg’s work, and that is, to my mind, the true achievement of Valentino and Sagittarius.
Valentino and Sagittarius are Ginzburg’s fourth and fifth works, respectively. Ginzburg’s first three novels all feature dispassionate protagonists, but they are still proper protagonists who take decisions, tell their own stories, and have defined desires, whose lives are altered by their own doings and not tethered to someone else. Ginzburg won’t eschew this model until Valentino and Sagittarius, when, for the first time—the first of many—she creates her trademark passive narrators, which a 1988 New York Times review of Valentino and Sagittarius called the “more or less self-effacing, more or less anonymous sister-daughter, impotent witness and willing victim of her family’s hopes and failures.”
I hope to illustrate how this elision is not only inaccurate but detracts from what makes Valentino and Sagittarius truly interesting case studies, both individually and as a diptych—that is, how the position of these passive sister-daughters is reduplicated, and complicated, by Ginzburg’s chosen points of view for the respective novellas. Both Valentino and Sagittarius are told in first-person, and they are some of the strangest uses of first-person I have encountered, remote first-persons that read like third-person, that leave few footprints on the page, that disguise themselves as third-person with strange and impossible omniscience, that are similar but crucially different precisely because of the subtle distinctions between the two narrators.
Valentino is about the eponymous spoiled son of a lower middle-class family that pours all their hopes and monies into his education, convinced as his father is that Valentino is destined to be a “man of consequence.” In a move that stuns his family, Valentino abandons his philandering and marries Maddalena, an older woman who is both wealthy and ugly. Valentino often draws the ire and resentment of his sister Clara, who types envelopes for a living and struggles with money for her own children and family. This story is entirely told by the other sister, Caterina, a schoolteacher who thinks she might be married one day but makes no move to do anything that might lead to such an event. Caterina stays with her parents because they wish so, and later moves into Maddalena’s house because Maddalena wishes so. Here she meets Kit, Maddalena’s lazy cousin, who mostly lounges around and plays cards with Valentino. After a beautiful day out together, Kit asks Caterina to marry him but eventually rescinds the offer.
Sagittarius is about a widow who moves to the suburbs from a village with her daughter Guilia and her son-in-law Chaim because she wants to be where intellectual life is. She dreams of opening an art gallery and dislikes Chaim because he attends to his patients via scooter and doesn’t have a big or profitable medical practice. Guilia is wholly uninterested in anything or any person, and spends most of her days in bed because she is prone to illness. Instead of encountering the kinds of intellectuals and artists she had hoped to meet, the mother instead strikes up a friendship with a mysterious woman named Scilla who wears sandals in the winter and paints portraits with crosses for eyes. Together, the mother and Scilla make fanciful plans to open an art gallery cum literary salon cum dress shop that they dream will become a hub for artists. Like Valentino, Sagittarius is narrated by the other sister of the family, unmarried and a teacher, like Caterina. Unlike Caterina, however, she is unnamed, and lives away from family, in an apartment she shares with a friend.
Because the narrators of Valentino and Sagittarius have much in common (both unmarried schoolteachers without much impact on their families’ lives), there is a tendency for readers to assume that they’re doing the same work in the story, that they’re autobiographical limbic extensions of Ginzburg’s reticent position of artist-observer in her own family. In defending the pairing of Valentino and Sagittarius, Cynthia Zarin, too, becomes subject to the pitfalls of false conflation, calling the two narrators “almost identical.” As with much of the discourse on these novellas, Zarin’s lucid introduction would rather note the commonalities between these two works than what distinguishes them. Yes, “in both novels, a domineering woman comes to grief,” but the women of inconsequence who stand witness to this theater in their respective stories are not occupying the same seats or vantages; they are not impotent in the same way.
There are useful differences of character between the two narrators, of submission to and subversion of the family’s tidal narrative, and these differences are effected through point of view, manifesting most literally in where the two are physically situated. Valentino’s Caterina lives at home, and living at home means she can be good company, a good listener, to whoever needs. Sagittarius’ narrator, conversely, makes the pointed decision to live in her own place, with a friend, and declines and accepts her mother-protagonist’s invitations into company at will.
The slight but mighty breach between Valentino’s Caterina and Sagittarius’ daughter is evident from the first lines of the novellas. Valentino begins, “I lived with my father, mother and brother in a small rented apartment in the middle of town,” where Sagittarius goes, “My mother had bought a house in the suburbs of the city. . . . My mother brought my sister Guilia and her husband to the house with her.” Though the reader might not yet notice, Ginzburg immediately establishes the difference between the two narrators and their respective veils of omniscience. Valentino sets up the division of importance with the “I”: This is as much Caterina’s story as her family’s, as Valentino’s, even though she will spend most of the novel denying it, tethering herself to others. Sagittarius, on the other hand, plainly writes off the narrator, who is but an eye trained upon her mother.
Valentino’s Caterina displays incredible narrative selflessness: Emotions do not exist in the singular for her (“we were amazed” or “we felt utterly lost” or “a faint hope stirred within us”) and her emotional terrain is almost entirely contiguous with others. It is only in the end that she breaks from the plural, Kit’s rescinded marriage proposal invoking the “I” at last: “I felt only shame, shame that he should have asked me to marry him and then changed his mind.” Here the matter of naming comes into play as well. While the singular pronouns occur in the subjective, objective, and possessive in both novellas, only Valentino actually names its narrator, and at a crucial moment too: Caterina is only named twice in the work, first when Kit tells her he cannot marry her, inciting those first-person feelings, and second when Maddalena asks her to leave her house. No one from her family—not her parents, not Valentino, not her aunt—ever calls her by her name. The unnamed narrator of Sagittarius needs no such moment of definition. In lieu of selflessness, Sagittarius’ narrator chooses absence. It is not that she shares no feelings with others, but that she rarely records feelings at all. In Sagittarius, the “I” is almost entirely silent, the “we” non-existent, and it is only the possessive “my,” used to refer to her mother, that marks the narrator’s presence at all. Her story is not one of emerging in the singular after a lifetime in the plural; she maintains instead a demarcation of territory. Regarding the main “plot” of the story, the Scilla-mother friendship, the narrator once expresses a fleeting suspicion, a kernel of unease, without considering the matters that unfold her responsibility. However, it is for the impending departure of her friend and roommate that she experiences real despair and regret. This is her true “home” and the site of her personal loss, and though she is tasked with the story of her family, the latter is not, in fact, her story. She needs no name to tell it.
The narrators’ physical presence thus determines their respective points of view—including what information the reader is allowed to have, what events they may glimpse—but the logics of omniscience in the novellas are not immediately obvious. In both novellas, omniscience is limited and unlimited by turns, the difference being that of domain. In Valentino, Caterina sometimes commands a certitude we would ascribe to omniscience (“there was absolutely no emotion behind my mother’s tears except grief and shock”) and other times lets slip the veil, revealing herself as mere interpreter, not the voice of god (“I sensed shame and embarrassment but didn’t understand why he should be ashamed or embarrassed”). Moreover, as is conventional to first-person, she is stationary and has no knowledge of that which occurs “off-stage” for her, like what Kit and Valentino do when they go off together, or how Valentino and Maddalena make up after fighting. Comparatively, Sagittarius’ omniscience is one that roves, unfettered by location but restricted by person—stitched only to the mother, privy to all her desires and doings and defeats but nothing more. The narrator witnesses very little of the novel’s action directly, yet we believe her, or we believe her ability to faithfully reconstruct the story complete with details that she could not realistically know, that her mother would not have revealed to her. In one instance, her mother knocks over a pierrot in her sisters’ china shop and “on her way out airily [promises] to pay.” This adverb, “airily,” is an invisible marker of point of view. It confers judgment on the act, a judgment surely not coming from the mother, who we have no reason to believe would even share this incident with our narrator. At another point in the novella, we learn that the mother would sometimes go to the cortisiere or the dressmaker “just for the sake of talking to somebody and having something to do.” Again, the reader is reminded that they are not simply witnessing behavior but receiving a narrative, an interpretation. The narrator of Sagittarius is not hesitant about putting forth conjecture as fact. She does not sense her mother’s guilt at scarfing down whipped cream nor does her mother seem jealous of Scilla’s supposed friends; her mother simply “felt guilty” and “was jealous.”
One might then wonder why, with so many conditions attached to them, these peculiar points of view even exist. The narrator of Sagittarius has little to no bearing on “plot” and the novella could certainly be rewritten as a close third-person, and Valentino could slant entirely to the first, sloughing off the veil of omniscience, giving its narrator more individual stakes. In today’s writing incubators, they certainly would be reworked. The workshop might ask: When you’re borrowing so unevenly from the characteristics of first- and third-person, why not adopt or reject one wholly? Why don this veil of omniscience?
Writer-translator Tim Parks has theorized that Ginzburg was drawn to such an effaced narration because “it’s exactly the last child’s difficulty in finding a role for herself among those who have come before her that conditions her personality. This anxious awareness of an absence where the narrating self should be is Ginzburg’s most effective way of describing herself. She is the family member without a position,” and scholar-translator Serena Todesco offers that the concealed narration in Family Lexicon “allows Ginzburg to permeate with her own voice the entire narrative while avoiding a superior, bird-eye perspective.” But the voice that pierces the narrative is not Ginzburg’s; it has a character, and a corresponding point of view, attached to it. The hidden markers of territory show plainly that what Ginzburg attempts with her narrators, particularly in these two novellas, is more complex than creating a vacuum for the author herself to fill. A 1992 interview with Salmagundi Magazine provides evidence: Ginzburg names Alberto Moravia as one of her models in youth, admiring specifically what she calls his ability to “depersonalize himself,” to “[recreate] himself in the form of many different characters.” This aspiration Ginzburg fulfills, and our pair of novellas serves as a microcosm for what she achieves across her oeuvre. Valentino and Sagittarius are examples of a Ginzburgian depersonalization, where the “almost identical” template of a woman can be reworked and remade, where subtle differences such as where the narrator lives might dictate the purview of a story.
Valentino and Sagittarius are told not only in the first-person but in the past tense, and the retrospective frame bestows upon the novellas the flavor of tragedy: The story being told is either one of precious time somehow lost or snatched, or of some kind of inevitable descent or doom, sometimes both. In the novellas, it is the latter. At the end of Valentino, Caterina is buried even further into her passivity by Kit and Maddalena’s rejections, and remains a faithful moth to her brother’s false light. In Sagittarius, the mother who had all this while expressed disdain at the passivity of her daughter Guilia and, by extension, her other daughter (our narrator), is forced at last to understand their resignations to the narrative.
The passive and uncertain perspectives of Ginzburg’s narrators collaborate with her thesis of tragedy, its inevitable parabola despite the attitudes a character might take up. While some characters in the novellas find pleasure in submitting to the greater forces of both fate and more dominating women, in being “borne away, as it were, in the palm of [their] imperious hand,” others, of course, resist until they cannot. Valentino’s Maddalena and Sagittarius’ mother both take pains to “realize” the lives they want, but their actions do not beget rewards, and instead they are forced to yield to the very passivity they’d spent the novellas decrying. In normal first- or third-person, these predestinations would become unbearably cynical, betraying the author’s presence immediately, and betraying it as unkind. While Ginzburg is not sentimental, she is far too sensitive to her characters’ realities to make such a move, and when, in the end, things sour, the tragedy is not pathetic but sincerely moving, like it was our own overbearing lonely mothers cheated by their only friend, our own private hopes for love raised and dashed.
The sensitivities Ginzburg displays are the same she once admired in the work of her contemporary Elsa Morante (who readers might recognize as Elena Ferrante’s inspiration), what Katrin Wehling-Giorgi calls “a comprehensive worldview that remains deeply affected but unencumbered by the experience of grief.” The veil of omniscience thus saves the novel’s voice from the hazards of both the saccharine and the sardonic. In Valentino, the most heartbreaking moment is when Caterina learns—after convincing herself that she could marry Kit and be content, that the union is not only desirable but one she herself desires—that Kit won’t marry her after all. She feels only shame (“how even the quality of beauty was lacking in my pain because I was not in love with Kit”). At long last, true interiority surfaces, and its sharp luminosity doesn’t retroactively dull the rest of the novel but whets it. The rarity of this moment evinces Ginzburg’s incredible restraint in how high and how often she wants to “crest” to the first-person’s pathos, an asceticism that I am not sure would survive the contemporary writing workshop. In a literary culture that prizes generous interior revelation, neat little points of view, and “active” characters that make themselves over-memorable to the point of caricature, it is surprising, and encouraging, that Ginzburg manages to crest at all from among the flood of under-read giants.
After my first reading of Valentino and Sagittarius, I remembered almost nothing of the narrators apart from their existence. They existed for me as wallpaper in their respective stories, despite how disparate their roles. Still, when a friend said the same to me, I became defensive. I was convinced that Ginzburg’s was neither an artless nor an arbitrary choice, but one of subtler and more complicated mechanics than we have grown used to. So I set out then to write my way to the why and how of it, finding myself instead communing with the wallpaper voices, that burst forth and retreat, that both “want nothing more than to be left alone to retreat softy into the shadows” and yearn desperately to “speak the words that most need to be spoken about the events which most closely concern [their] family and what has happened to [them].”
Ginzburg wrote in the author’s note for one of her novels that although the characters are fictional, she is sorry to have loved them as if they were real[1]. If I have felt for these characters as if I knew them, it is not because of any empathic faculties within me, but by virtue of Ginzburg’s formidable design, her veiled logics of omniscience, her inimitable points of view.
Tanisha Tekriwal is a writer and filmmaker based in Mumbai who is calling on you, dear reader, to join them in refusing and resisting the genocide of the Palestinians and all the oppressed peoples around the globe. They call on you to obstruct—with any and every thing at your disposal—the machinery of empire. Tanisha’s fiction has been supported by Bread Loaf, Tin House, and The Queer Writer’s Room. They were the Octavia Butler Scholar at the 2024 Clarion West Writer’s Workshop. They are ready for a new world.
[1] Ginzburg, Natalia, et al. Voices in the Evening. New Directions Publishing, 2021.
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