All Our Yesterdays

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As you say, it’s fascinating to see how some elements relate to Ginzburg’s own life experiences, especially the upheaval of war and its impact on family life.

But the challenge that faces them in the end is to make sense of a world that is no longer at war, a world in which heroic acts of courage are no longer necessary or even possible, a world in which newspapers have to “come out every day with the rising of the sun”. One knows there won't be the intimidating burden of making the described world appear authentic, of getting all the period detail right. After the death of Anna’s father, near the beginning of the novel, Ippolito befriends Emanuele, one of the boys from the house opposite. Tai pirmoji mano pažintis su žydų kilmės rašytoja Natalia Ginzburg, bet labai tikiuosi, kad ne paskutinė. But we can acknowledge that these yesterdays – which Ginzburg fictionalised, but which were lived by families across Europe and the world – are all of ours, and reverberate today as we face a fresh wave of political and social turmoil.Then her brother Giustino whispers one word to her, a word that will change the course of the novel and Anna’s life: “Politics.

Yet in the early years the war is not yet all-consuming and they even go off for their usual summer vacations. I read this novel over weeks rather than days, and it really did benefit to read it as slow as possible.It’s a brilliant novel, full of warmth, intelligence and humanity, punctuated by wry observations on the tangled business of life. As readers we grow to know and love Anna deeply, but we cannot help loving at the same time her cantankerous father, her sombre and beautiful brother Ippolito, the fretting Signora Maria and all the other complex and interesting people that populate the world of the book.