While initially focusing their energies on devising the mechanics of a revolution that would overthrow Fascism, Ippolito, Emanuele and Danilo realise that an even bigger threat has entered the picture – Hitler and his frightening vision of Nazi Germany. All Our Yesterdays, then, is another superb novel by Ginzburg; a seamless blend of the personal with the global, where the comparatively smaller dilemmas of families and relationships can be as debilitating and crushing to individuals as the bigger, large-scale dramas of politics, war and violence. Natalia Ginzburg presents a chronicle of two families living opposite each other, in a northern Italian town, one slightly impoverished, the other rich. Man atrodo, kad labai sunku parašyt knygą apie kasdienybę, be didelių plot twistų ar įvykių, ir padaryt, kad ji vis tiek prikaustytų. That said, I think these characters may well be based on real people, so they’re probably relatively close to the truth even if they might seems a little clichéd to us as readers.

Jaučiausi šiek tiek apgauta knygos anotacijos – skaitydama ją tikėjausi, kad kūrinys suksis apie Aną ir jos gyvenimą, nėštumą ir to nešamus klausimus, problemas ir nepatogumus karo akivaizdoje, bet gavau kai ką kito. On completing All Our Yesterdays, however, I was prompted to offer quite a different response – both from the one I anticipated, and from my usual style of review. I’ve read a lot of translations of Italian novels set during the war and it seems to me this is the perfect book to learn what life was like in Italy during WW II.It is only around the middle of the novel that the story starts to gain momentum, not coincidentally when the war really breaks out and the protagonists are pulled along. My family didn’t experience invasion, despite living in fear of it for a good part of the war, and this represents another fundamental difference between them and Ginzburg’s characters. In looking for reviews on the book (which was originally published in 1952 in Italian and then in 1956 in English by Angus Davidson), I found a review in The Guardian (see the first review below) and the reviewers says not to start off with Natalia Ginzburg’s oeuvre with this book because “.

her words seemed to express something completely true about my experience of living, and about life.With Mussolini in power and fascism on the rise, Ippolito becomes increasingly interested in politics, debating the issues of the day with Emanuele – the eldest son from the wealthy family opposite – and their principled friend, Danilo, one of Concettina’s many fiancés. It's an unwanted pregnancy that drives the plot and determines circumstances rather than the war itself. Its stakes are as high as the most cataclysmic crisis of the 20th century, and as low as the marriage of one young woman, the fate of one family dog.

Unexpectedly for her, she finds herself confessing to Cenzo Rena who suggests that they marry so that she can keep the child. When the fathers die, the boys are released from paternal oppression and they start anti-fascist activities. But it is also a story about the possibility of knowing what is right, and living by that knowledge, whatever the consequences. Yet in the early years the war is not yet all-consuming and they even go off for their usual summer vacations.Hier schetst ze het wel en wee van een onorthodoxe italiaanse familie tijdens het facisme in italië en de daaropvolgende oorlog. Over time, a friendship develops between Anna and Emanuele’s younger brother, Giuma, a rather arrogant, insensitive boy who seems more interested in himself than anyone around him. But subsequently, Danilo is arrested, whipping up a frenzy in the family to burn all evidence and material pointing to their dissident activities in which Anna also takes part. Ippolito sinks into a morbid depression at the German occupation of Poland, “with the Germans taking people away to die in the concentration camps … his will to live left him at the thought of those camps, where the Germans put their cigarettes out against the prisoners’ foreheads”. At times the story is Jerry Springer-like as when one daughter marries the crazy older man, a family friend who lives in the richer house, who was having an affair with her mother.

All Our Yesterdays was published seven years after the end of the war, and it is difficult not to hear Ginzburg’s own voice in this passage, sitting and grinding away at her desk, “without either danger or fear”, trying to make sense of what remains. Anos čia radau mano skoniui per mažai, buvo tarsi bandoma papasakoti apie visus veikėjus, bet nė į vieną nepasigilinama labiau, todėl kai kur pasirodė, kad autorė plaukia paviršiumi, nors medžiagos pasikapstyti giliau čia buvo apstu. Gaila, nes lūkesčius buvau visai užsikėlusi, bet tai turbūt tik dar vienas priminimas, kad kartais geriau į knygą nerti nieko nežinant ir nesileisti apgaunamai anotacijų.

A quem quer que nos apeguemos ao longo da narrativa, nunca estamos realmente preparados para os perder - na ficção como na realidade. As a masterclass in pure storytelling delight, The Glass Pearls might be its most radical reissue yet. Unlike the unfortunate Signora Maria, my grandmother, and her mother and father, did make it down to the air-raid shelter in time, but had no indication that they’d lost their home until they came out of the shelter the next morning – ‘you never hear the one that hits you’, was my grandmother’s refrain for the rest of her life. Another singular feature of the novel is Ginzburg’s wry humour and deadpan wit as reflected in her striking prose style. Interestingly, it has resonances for me with the book I’m just finished, Victor Serge’s “Last Times”.