{"id":139079,"date":"2019-08-27T11:07:59","date_gmt":"2019-08-27T15:07:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=139079"},"modified":"2019-08-27T11:45:45","modified_gmt":"2019-08-27T15:45:45","slug":"natalia-ginzburgs-broken-mirror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/08\/27\/natalia-ginzburgs-broken-mirror\/","title":{"rendered":"Natalia Ginzburg\u2019s Broken Mirror"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_139100\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/francesco_hayez_040.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-139100\" class=\"size-full wp-image-139100\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/francesco_hayez_040.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1000\" height=\"750\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/francesco_hayez_040.jpg 1000w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/francesco_hayez_040-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/francesco_hayez_040-768x576.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-139100\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Francesco Hayez, <em>Portrait of Alessandro Manzoni<\/em>, 1841, oil on canvas, 46&#8243; x 36&#8243;. Public domain.<\/p><\/div>\n<p><em>The Manzoni Family<\/em> is a meeting between two authors who at first glance could hardly seem more different. Alessandro Manzoni is simply the most celebrated figure in modern Italian literature. His great novel <em>The Betrothed<\/em>,\u00a0published in quite different editions in 1827 and 1840, is the first modern novel in Italian, the later edition marking a milestone in the con\u00adsolidation of Tuscan Italian as the language for a potentially united Italy. Profoundly Catholic in inspiration, the book was placed at the core of the Italian school syllabus after the country achieved unification in 1861 and still offers a linguistic and moral example to generation after generation of Italian children.<\/p>\n<p>Natalia Ginzburg, on the other hand, was a Jewish novelist and a Communist, whose husband Leone Ginzburg died in a Fascist prison during World War II. While Manzoni\u2019s prose now seems elaborate, sometimes magnil\u00adoquent, Ginzburg\u2019s is as spare, droll, and laconic as Italian writ\u00ading ever gets. While he narrated grandiose drama in one eight-hundred-page tome, she chronicled the intimacy of the humdrum in eight rather slender novels and novellas. He was a lifelong phobic who suffered frequent panic attacks and found it impos\u00adsible to leave the house without company and protection. She showed great courage and initiative during the war, saving her children and herself from the Nazi round-ups of the Jews in Rome after her husband\u2019s death. But perhaps most of all, Manzoni was a profoundly religious man whose faith is very much at the center of his writing. Ginzburg was not religious at all and had nothing to say on the matter. <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Why, then, this book? Perhaps the answer lies in the word <em>family<\/em>. All of Ginzburg\u2019s novels are very much about families, and all her characters take on their charm and identity insofar as they are seen in relation to others. Her most famous book, <em>Family Lexicon<\/em>, is a lively study of her own family and circle of friends, in which everyone from the most illustrious to the most humble is given the same space, while she, the author, is barely present. It is rather as if she were telling us, If you want to know about me, you need to read about my family. All her work, she often observed, is in one way or other autobiographical, and many of her stubbornly awkward characters stand in relation to their families as she did to hers.<\/p>\n<p>In the late seventies, Ginzburg was commissioned to produce an anthology of Italian literature for use in schools. This inevita\u00adbly brought her back to Manzoni. A friend persuaded her to read the many volumes of letters connected with the author and his extended family. Suddenly \u201cI understood how autobiographical <em>The Betrothed <\/em>was,\u201d Ginzburg remarked, \u201chow much he was like his many characters.\u201d At this point, both the great novel and the writer behind it became more interesting to her, made more sense; in short, Ginzburg was fascinated by this choral aspect of life, the way no one, and no work of art, stands alone.<\/p>\n<p>Yet <em>The Manzoni Family <\/em>is not meant as an approach to Manzoni\u2019s writing, nor do you need to know anything about <em>The Betrothed <\/em>to enjoy it. In 1973 Ginzburg had written an epistolary novel, <em>Caro Michele<\/em>,\u00a0and would publish another, <em>The City and the House <\/em>in 1984, about which she said, \u201cI see the world \u2026 as if everyone were looking for a father they don\u2019t have and at the same time trying to be a father without managing to.\u201d This was exactly the story she found reading Alessandro Manzoni\u2019s let\u00adters. Manzoni\u2019s official father was nothing more than his moth\u00ader\u2019s husband, and that only briefly. The real father was a lover who took no interest in the boy. Manzoni would spend his life attaching himself to older and illustrious friends, or to priests and spiritual advisers, father figures. At the same time he had nine children himself, and proved quite inadequate as a parent.<\/p>\n<p>Discovering this extraordinarily rich correspondence, the complex weave of alliances and enmities, of wives, lovers, friends, and children, nannies and priests; the dense and fascinating world of early nineteenth-century Milan, Florence, and Paris; the diffi\u00adcult journeys and the endless illnesses; the wrenching bereave\u00adments, political turmoil, and unexpected literary celebrity; the intellectual discussions on the one hand and the domestic minu\u00adtiae on the other, Ginzburg must have felt it was the perfect material for the writerly skills she had spent a lifetime honing.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWriting novels, I always had the feeling I had a broken mir\u00adror in my hand,\u201d she observed, \u201csomething I always hoped I could put back together whole.\u201d These letters from scores of corre\u00adspondents over almost a century are the shattered mirror of an entire society. Ginzburg has reassembled them as she does her novels: unobtrusively, seamlessly, generously. It\u2019s hard to think of a story more complex, or more effortlessly readable. And if, as the author is occasionally obliged to admit, a piece of the mirror is missing here and there, that is simply because what we are talking about here is life as it was really lived\u2014the fine, tumultu\u00adous life from which great literature miraculously springs.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em>Tim Parks is the author of more than twenty novels and works of nonfiction, including <\/em>Europa<em>, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize. His essays have appeared regularly in <\/em>The New Yorker<em> and <\/em>The New York Review of Books<em>, for which he blogs. He lives in Italy.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.skyhorsepublishing.com\/9781628728972\/the-manzoni-family\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-139101\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/9781628728972-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"100\" height=\"150\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/9781628728972-200x300.jpg 200w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/9781628728972-768x1152.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/9781628728972-683x1024.jpg 683w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/9781628728972.jpg 1000w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a>Excerpted from <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.skyhorsepublishing.com\/9781628728972\/the-manzoni-family\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">The Manzoni Family: A Novel<\/a><em>,<\/em><em> by Natalia Ginzburg, with permission from Arcade Publishing, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing. \u00a9 1983, 1989, 1994, 2005, and 2013 Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Torino. English-language translation copyright \u00a9 1987, 2013 by Marie Evans. Foreword by Tim Parks \u00a9 2019 by Skyhorse Publishing.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What compelled Natalia Ginzburg to write a novel about Alessandro Manzoni, the father of modern Italian literature?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1831,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-139079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Natalia Ginzburg\u2019s Broken Mirror by Tim Parks<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What compelled Natalia Ginzburg to write a novel about Alessandro Manzoni, the father of modern Italian literature?\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/08\/27\/natalia-ginzburgs-broken-mirror\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Natalia Ginzburg\u2019s Broken Mirror by Tim Parks\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"August 27, 2019 \u2013 What compelled Natalia Ginzburg to write a novel about Alessandro Manzoni, the father of modern Italian literature?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/08\/27\/natalia-ginzburgs-broken-mirror\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2019-08-27T15:07:59+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2019-08-27T15:45:45+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/francesco_hayez_040.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1000\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"750\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Tim Parks\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Tim Parks\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/08\/27\/natalia-ginzburgs-broken-mirror\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/08\/27\/natalia-ginzburgs-broken-mirror\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Tim Parks\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/ed79c8481b5a2b509083469efb0841ac\"},\"headline\":\"Natalia Ginzburg\u2019s Broken Mirror\",\"datePublished\":\"2019-08-27T15:07:59+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2019-08-27T15:45:45+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/08\/27\/natalia-ginzburgs-broken-mirror\/\"},\"wordCount\":986,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/08\/27\/natalia-ginzburgs-broken-mirror\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/francesco_hayez_040.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Arts &amp; 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