Voices in the Evening

by Natalia Ginzburg, D.M. Low (Translator), Colm Tóibín (Introduction)

Overview

From one of Italy’s greatest writers, a stunning novel “filled with shimmering, risky, darting observation” (Colm Tóibín)

After WWII, a small Italian town struggles to emerge from under the thumb of Fascism. With wit, tenderness, and irony, Elsa, the novel’s narrator, weaves a rich tapestry of provincial Italian life: two generations of neighbors and relatives, their gossip and shattered dreams, their heartbreaks and struggles to find happiness. Elsa wants to imagine a future for herself, free from the expectations and burdens of her town’s history, but the weight of the past will always prove unbearable, insistently posing the question: “Why has everything been ruined?”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811231008
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	05/04/2021
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Natalia Ginzburg (1916–1991), “who authored twelve books and two plays; who, because of anti-Semitic laws, sometimes couldn’t publish under her own name; who raised five children and lost her husband to Fascist torture; who was elected to the Italian parliament as an independent in her late sixties—this woman does not take her present conditions as a given. She asks us to fight back against them, to be brave and resolute. She instructs us to ask for better, for ourselves and for our children” (Belle Boggs, The New Yorker).

D. M. Low (1890-1972) was a British translator of Italian literature and biographer of Edward Gibbon.

Colm Tóibín is currently the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman professor of the humanities at Columbia University and succeeded Martin Amis as professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester.

Editorial Reviews

"There is perhaps no greater archivist of the family lexicon than the Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg."

Jewish Currents - Jess Bergman

"The concepts, emotions and characters in her books are complex and unforgettable."

New York Times - Laurie Anderson

"Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like."

Rachel Cusk

"Her sentences have great precision and clarity, and I learn a lot when I read her."

Zadie Smith

"Ginzburg is a miniaturist. Her themes are buried in gestures, fragments, absences—not in what is said, but in what is not said....When there are glimpses of happiness in Ginzburg’s work, they take root in unlikely places, outside the narrow confines of convention. Voices in the Evening, set in the period immediately after the war, is a portrait of the children of a factory boss as told by Elsa, the factory accountant’s daughter, a typically opaque Ginzburgian narrator. Elsa is having a covert love affair with Tommasino, the youngest of the boss’s children, and the pair meet every Wednesday in a modest rented room. Ginzburg sketches the parameters of their relationship with typical precision, through an accretion of specifics that accumulate incredible force, humor, and beauty."

Bookforum - Negar Azimi

"I’m utterly entranced by Ginzburg’s style – her mysterious directness, her salutary ability to lay things bare that never feels contrived or cold, only necessary, honest, clear."

Maggie Nelson

"Sharp and lively."

Lydia Davis

"Though the political context is important in understanding the nuances of her work, Ginzburg’s talent, and how fresh these stories still feel, is in her note-perfect characterizations. The many political frictions offer a context, but it’s these imaginary/real people who are front and center."

Chicago Review of Books - Mandana Chaffa

★ 2021-03-17
In the shadow of World War II, a young couple explores their feelings for one another.

In this short but very affecting novel, originally published in English in 1963, characters speak of trivialities. “What a fine head of hair he has, at that age!” Elsa’s mother tells her as, walking home, they pass a neighbor. “Did you notice how ugly the dog has become?” Neither Elsa’s mother nor anyone else in their small Italian village knows that Elsa has fallen in love with Tommasino, the youngest child of Balotta, the old factory owner. The book takes a looser structure than Ginzburg’s others. Elsa and Tommasino bookend the story with their affair, but the middle is taken up by an account of Tommasino’s siblings and their spouses: Purillo, the adopted cousin who takes over their father’s factory; long-faced Gemmina; dreamy Vincenzino; and Mario, who marries Xenia, a Russian who speaks French but no Italian and so cannot converse with anyone in the village. What all these lives have to do with one another doesn’t become clear until the end. What is clear is that there is a darker current running beneath all the trivialities. During the war, Purillo sympathized with the fascists, an affectation for which the others mocked him. Nebbia, a friend, was killed behind the house. “I have the feeling,” Tommasino tells Elsa near the end, “that they have already lived enough, those others before me; that they have already consumed all the reserves, all the vitality that there was for us….Nothing was left over for me.” Rarely does Ginzburg directly address politics—fascism, in particular—but its shadow hangs over the book just like it hangs over the characters. The result is profound and profoundly moving.

As deceptively diffuse as it is meticulously observed, Ginzburg’s novel is a gem.

Kirkus Reviews