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  • The Paris Review

    The Domestic Disappointments of Natalia Ginzburg

    by Dustin Illingworth Jun 20, 2019 5 minutes

    In the novels of Natalia Ginzburg, family has a private grammar. “If my siblings and I were to find ourselves in a dark cave or among millions of people,” she wrote in , her most celebrated novel, “just one of those phrases or words would immediately allow us to recognize each other.” Ginzburg’s intimate cosmologies are fraught with allusive significance. Fantasy is the prism through which we glimpse her character’s dissatisfactions with each other. A wife may wish for a more loyal husband, or a father a more dynamic daughter, or a mother a smarter son, and in the strength of their desire, believe it is so. Out of these illusions, all manner of misunderstandings emerge, some comic (Ginzburg is a very funny writer), and others tragic. Ginzburg’s characters reveal themselves most fully in their unacknowledged weaknesses, the places where their

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