The City and the House: A Novel
312
The City and the House: A Novel
312Paperback(Reprint)
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Overview
This powerful novel is set against the background of Italy from 1939 to 1944, from the anxious months before the country entered the war, through the war years, to the Allied victory with its trailing wake of anxiety, disappointment, and grief.
The city is Rome, the hub of Italian life and culture. The house is Le Margherite, a home where the sprawling cast of The City and the House is welcome. At the center of this lush epistolary novel is Lucrezia, mother of five and lover of many. Among her lovers—and perhaps the father of one of her children—is Giuseppe. After the sale of Le Margherite, the characters wander aimlessly as if in search of a lost paradise.
What was once rooted, local, and specific has become general and common, a matter of strangers and of pointless arrivals and departures. And at the edge of the novel are people no longer able to form any sustained or sustaining relationships. Here, once again, Ginzburg pulls us through a thrilling and true exploration of the disintegration of family in modern society. She handles a host of characters with a deft touch and her typical impressionist hand, and offers a story full of humanity, passion, and keen perception.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628728958 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Arcade |
| Publication date: | 02/05/2019 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Natalia Ginzburg was born in Palermo, Italy in 1916. She was an Italian author whose work explored family relationships, politics during and after the Fascist years and World War II, and philosophy. She wrote novels, short stories and essays, for which she received the Strega Prize and Bagutta Prize. Modest and intensely reserved, Ginzburg never shied away from the traumas of history, whether writing about the Turin of her childhood, the Abruzzi countryside or contemporary Rome—all the while approaching those traumas only indirectly, through the mundane details and catastrophes of personal life. Most of her works were also translated into English and published in the United Kingdom and United States. She wrote acclaimed translations of both Proust and Flaubert into Italian. She died in Rome in 1991.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
GIUSEPPE TO FERRUCCIO
Rome, 15th October
My dear Ferruccio,
I booked my ticket this morning. I leave in six weeks, on 30th November. I sent off my three trunks a week ago. There are books, suits and shirts in them. Phone me when they arrive. I know how much you prefer the telephone to letters. I'm the opposite.
I am very happy to be leaving. I am very happy that I'll see you again. My life here has become difficult recently. I couldn't breathe any more. When I decided to come and see you I was able to breathe again.
I am also very sorry to be leaving. I think I shall miss certain people and places I'm strongly attached to. I don't think I'll make new friends. I've become rather solitary over the years. I have had some friends here, not that many, and I shall miss them. But there has to be something to put up with. I shall be with you and that will mean a great deal to me. I am very fond of you, as you know, and I have been painfully aware of your absence all these years. Your visits were short, and few and far between. I enjoyed them, it's true, but at the same time they upset me because they were short and because I was always afraid I bored you; I was always afraid that being with me meant very little to you.
I often wonder whether you are pleased that I'm coming. True, it was you who told me to come, but sometimes I feel that perhaps you regretted this afterwards. But if you have had regrets, let's say no more about it at this stage. I have booked my ticket and I am definitely leaving. I will try to be as little financial trouble to you as I can.
I am coming to America like someone who has decided to throw himself into the sea and hopes he will emerge either dead or new and changed. I know this kind of talk irritates you, but this is what I feel and I want you to know.
With love from, Giuseppe
CHAPTER 2GIUSEPPE TO LUCREZIA
Rome, 20th October
My dear Lucrezia,
I don't think we shall see each other again. I think yesterday was the last time. I told you that I might come again, next Saturday, to Monte Fermo, but I don't think I shall. Yesterday evening as we were coming through the gate I looked up at Le Margherite, and I thought that I was looking at your house for the last time. I don't think I shall come and see you again. And I don't think you will come to Rome. There's no point. Don't come on my behalf. I said goodbye to you yesterday, and I don't like saying goodbye to people twice. Don't phone me, and I won't phone you either. I don't want to hear your voice, nor do I want you to hear mine. I prefer this sheet of paper.
You told me that you will come and see me in America. But I don't believe it. In all the years I've known you I've never seen you set off on a long journey. The only thing I've seen you do, in all these years, is to jump in your beat-up old Volkswagen that stinks of wet dog to get to the market in Pianura. And so I think the last time I'll see you was yesterday, on the station at Pianura. You had on your shaggy white woollen jacket with camels embroidered along the edge, and rather grubby white trousers, your hair was gathered on top of your head and one lock of it hung down on to your neck, and you were leaning against the wall. That's how I remember you. You were very pale. But then you are always pale. While he was waiting for the train to arrive, Piero said, 'Why don't you get the next one, it leaves in an hour?' I am very fond of Piero. I stood at the window and saw the three of you: you, Piero, Serena. Piero had his thick red scarf on. Serena was eating bread and cheese. You were leaning against the wall. That's how I remember you. Piero's sweetness and seriousness. His blond curls that are always a little greasy even when it's cold. Serena with her jumper covered in crumbs. Your height and pallor, the black lock of hair hanging down on to your neck, your hands in your pockets.
I shall do various things in the few days before I leave. At the moment I have to buy some shirts, a winter suit and an overcoat. Then I have to empty my flat. Not of its furniture but of everything which is of no use to anyone, old papers, old letters, old pots, old rags. Not the furniture, because as you know the Lanzaras are buying it with the furniture. Roberta says everything's going for a song. But you know how Roberta is. She immediately assigns every object a name, an importance and a financial value. I see Roberta a lot these days. She comes up and helps me empty the drawers. According to Roberta, my selling the house is a real piece of lunacy. Never sell bricks and mortar, never. You should hang on to bricks and mortar for dear life. And people have offered her immense sums for her flat, which is immediately under mine and is the same as mine, and she has refused them because she wouldn't dream of letting it go. But how is it possible that the Lanzaras are paying so little. My dear Giuseppe, she says to me, the Lanzaras are leading you up the garden path. And what will yon do if one fine day you decide to come back? I answer that I don't think I'll ever want to do that. This is how we talk whilst we are emptying the drawers. Every so often we look at photographs of our relatives, and of when we were children, Ferruccio, Roberta and me, on the beach or skating.
The other day as we were walking in the woods Piero asked me 'Why are you going to America?' Usually when people ask me this I say the same things. I've no money. I'm tired of writing articles for newspapers. I'm sick of newspapers. My brother in Princeton knows a great many people. He teaches biology at the university and is very well thought of. He's lived there for many years. He'll find me a job. He has already made enquiries. I shall give Italian lessons in small schools. Teachers are well-paid in America. And then my brother is well-off and has no problems. I don't imagine I shall be completely dependent on him, but it's true that I will be to a certain extent. I shall do the housework and prepare meals. You know that I'm good at housework and very quick. I would like to live in Princeton, a tiny town that I've never seen but which I can imagine because my brother has told me a lot about it. I would like to live in a tiny American town. I've never seen America and now I'll see it. I shall use the library at Princeton. There are lots of libraries there. I shall at last educate myself. I shall have peace in which to work and study and I don't ask for anything else. This is how I want to prepare myself for my old age. I have never managed to do anything and I am nearly fifty. I could go to America for a year and then come back. Well, I don't know. I don't like travelling. For some time now I've wanted to decide what to do, and then do it once and for all.
I like the idea of staying with my brother. He is only a little older than I am but he always led me and advised me when we were boys. I am an insecure person. I need someone who will reassure me. My brother is a man who has all the qualities I lack, he has a calm temperament and thinks clearly. I am very attached to my brother. But, said Piero, when your brother was here you were very depressed and seemed as if you hoped he would leave again. This is true. Having him in my house all the time wore me out. This is a house in which I am used to being alone. Finding him sitting in the living-room when I got up in the morning bothered me, and so did having to decide what he should do every day and who I should arrange for him to meet. Finding his striped dressing-gown in the bathroom bothered me. I'm not a hospitable person. I don't like having guests in the house, nor being the guest in someone else's house. But it won't be a question of guests in America: neither of us will be a guest. We shall be two brothers living together.
As soon as I get up in the morning I start to think of everything I am about to leave, of everything I am going to miss in America. I am leaving you. I am leaving your children, Piero, your house called Le Margherite, though goodness only knows why you called it that as no marguerites are to be seen there, nor even anywhere near. I am leaving the few friends I always saw at your house, Serena, Egisto, Albina, with whom we used to go for walks in the woods and with whom we used to play cards in the evening. I say 'used to' but this is a mistake, because you will continue to go for walks and to play cards, and the 'used to' refers only to me. I am leaving my cousin Roberta, a splendid, noisy, interfering, rough diamond of a woman who is devoted to everyone. I am leaving my flat here, where I have lived for more than twenty years. The fake-fur armchair with a plaid over it where I sit in the mornings as soon as I wake up. The four-poster bed with thin wooden columns where I finish up in the evenings. The kitchen window that looks on to the convent garden. The living-room windows that look on to via Nazario Sauro. The newspaper kiosk on the corner, the Mariuccia Restaurant that I occasionally go down to for a meal, the sports equipment shop and the Esperia Café. I am leaving you. I am leaving your broad, pale face, your green eyes, your black locks of hair, your swollen lips. We haven't made love now for three years, but when I see you I always have the feeling that we have done so yesterday. Whereas in fact we shall never do so again. That day at Viterbo you said 'Never again'. I am also leaving Viterbo behind, that hotel and that room I hated, and to which I returned by myself, last summer, for no reason whatsoever. Perhaps because I was very unhappy and I wanted to be even more so. I asked them to give me that exact room, number twenty-three. I often think about that room, and I shall think about it in America: I shall miss it, because we also miss places we have hated. But perhaps in America that room will be vaguer, more distant and innocuous. As for my son, I can't say I'm leaving him behind because I don't really know where he is, and I might see him more often in America, as long journeys are no problem for him.
Say goodbye to your children for me. I sort of said goodbye to them yesterday; I waved to them as I was passing through the kitchen where they were watching television and eating. I didn't want to stop and kiss them because I would have been upset and this would have been ridiculous to them; they would have carried away a ridiculous impression of me. Say goodbye especially to Cecilia, who is the child of yours I like best. You have told me that you think Graziano is my child, but you are probably mistaken, seen from behind he is just like your mother-in-law Annina. Cecilia has very beautiful eyes and she reminds me a little of my sister who died young. Daniele has a natural talent for drawing, as I did when I was a boy. Obviously neither Daniele or Cecilia are mine because they were born when I didn't know you, but what I mean is that I find something congenial in all your children except Graziano. Even the little one is quick-witted and charming. He isn't mine because he was born a year after Viterbo, and anyway he is identical to Piero. I find Graziano rather uninteresting, he's a real know-all. Perhaps it is those glasses that make him look like a little professor. The other four seem much nicer to me. But perhaps attributing the paternity of the least interesting of your children to me is part of your spitefulness against me.
Nevertheless, because you said Graziano is mine, I watched him carefully yesterday, whilst I was walking past and they were eating. He was eating a big plate of stew and polenta; he was serious, with his glasses on the end of that freckled nose of his. He was wearing his flannel pyjamas and was as red as a lobster, perhaps because he had just had a bath. That's how I remember him. None of your children are like you; they have freckles and red, puffy cheeks, none of them have your splendid pallor.
Anyway, believe me, none of your children is mine. They are all Piero's. He is an excellent father and they have no need of any other. The only child I have is Alberico. I would have liked someone different. But that certainly goes for him too. Who knows how many times he has thought that he would like to have a different father, someone other than me. When we are together we find it extremely difficult to say the simplest things to each other. I never say much about Alberico. I don't say much about him to anyone. I think my cousin Roberta has talked about him to you. I have a photograph of him hanging on the wall here, Roberta took it when he was five years old and my wife and I were still together. He was a beautiful child. I loved him, it's not difficult to love a child. I loved him but I never wanted to stay with him for very long. He soon bored me. I also have a photograph of my wife on the wall here, a frail girl enveloped in a shawl. She bored me too. All right, I was easily bored. I was very young and I was afraid of boredom. I am no longer so afraid of boredom but I was then. I was bored by my wife too. I found her stupid. I was bored with the child because he was a child, I was bored with her because she was stupid, and this was a particularly wearisome boredom. Before I married her I had not realized that she was so stupid, but then I gradually discovered how immensely stupid she was. She didn't find me stupid, though she did find me boring, and she found that I didn't give her enough of the things she wanted. Not enough love; not enough distractions and acquaintances; not enough money. And so Alberico spent the first years of his life with two people who were bored by each other. We separated. She and Alberico went to live in a flat in Trastevere. She took a lover, a cousin of hers who had been a childhood friend. She spent a lot of time away from the house and she left the child with Aunt Bice, a relation of my mother's. Two years after we separated she became ill during the summer and no one realized what was the matter with her. She had polio. We – Aunt Bice, her childhood friend and I – took her to a clinic. She was dead within a few weeks. Alberico was away at a summer camp and he had to be fetched. I didn't go; Aunt Bice went. Afterwards Aunt Bice always did everything. Alberico went to stay with her for good. My parents didn't want him because they said they were old and tired. My wife's parents were dead. I didn't want him because I just didn't feel up to it. The childhood friend had gone off to live in Venezuela. Alberico was taken to Aunt Bice's flat in via Torricelli, and he stayed there. Then Aunt Bice made her will and left everything she had to Alberico. And Aunt Bice was rich too. She didn't look it, but in fact she was rich. She was a general's widow.
Alberico was ten when he went to live in via Torricelli for good. He was a quiet, biddable, docile child and didn't cause any bother. He studied hard at school and he enjoyed it. Though I thought that all that boredom between my wife and me, which he had breathed in when he was little, must have poisoned him and that one day it would somehow or other burst out. I went to fetch him now and again and took him to the newspaper offices with me. At that time I had a steady job at the newspaper and I spent many hours every day there. Then I used to take him out to eat in a restaurant, and I'd take him to the cinema or to the Villa Borghese. I was bored and unsure of myself. I didn't know what to say to him. I talked about when I was a child. About my brother and me when we were children. About his mother. When I talked about his mother I tried to see her again as I had seen her when we first met, but this was not easy because memories of our later years immediately came to me. Alberico used to listen. He often mentioned Uncle Dé, his mother's cousin, the childhood friend. He seemed to me to be the person he cared most about in the world. When he mentioned him his face lit up. Uncle Dé had given him a stamp collection and a globe of the world. He occasionally sent him stamps from Venezuela. I used to take him home again and leave him at the front door, and go back to the newspaper with light, quick steps and a feeling of relief that I was alone again.
One day Alberico ran away from home. We found him a long way away two days later, at the end of Corso Francia. I remember that Uncle Dé, the childhood friend, had lived in that area while he was in Rome. Once or twice I thought to myself that I would write to Uncle Dé and suggest that he be in touch with Alberico as often as he could. But I didn't do it. I knew that Uncle Dé was working in a construction company in Venezuela, and that he was married. I think he soon stopped sending stamps.
Alberico ran away from home many other times, and we had to scour the city for him. Aunt Bice used to call me up and we spent days looking for him, in streets, in the public gardens, in police stations and railway stations. We would come across him sitting calmly in police stations, silent, in his blue anorak, with his little cardboard suitcase on his knees. He was very attached to that little suitcase and when he ran away from home he always took it with him. He kept cards of football players in it. When he was fourteen he still seemed to be a little boy. He had a rosy-pink complexion, with smooth cheeks and angelic curls. Now his curls are those of an old sheep, long, straggling, loose and soft; he always seems tired, and he has a short bristly beard; he is often dressed in black and looks like a hearse. When he laughs you see his marvellously white teeth. But then he doesn't laugh very often. I think all that boredom which he took in from his mother and me when he was little has now come to the surface, as I had expected it to. He started to read Political Science, then he left university and took up photography. But perhaps he would rather be a director – of films, or in the theatre – or an actor. He doesn't know. He's always changing his mind. It's very tiring for me to keep asking him what he wants to do. Actually I have never really known what I wanted to do either and I have spent my life asking myself. If I asked myself this without getting a clear answer, why should I expect a clear answer from him? At first I didn't mind working at the newspaper, then I became thoroughly disgusted with newspapers and now I'm leaving Italy. The difference between him and me is that I have no money, whereas at the moment he has, thanks to Aunt Bice. On the other hand he is already twenty-five. He is a man. According to Roberta I ought to suggest something to him, but I don't know what kind of suggestion I could make. When I see him in front of me, my only concern is to annoy him as little as possible. Bore him as little as possible. I always think of that immense boredom that existed between me and his mother, which he drank in sip after sip, day after day, when he was a child.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "City and the House"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a..
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
GIUSEPPE TO FERRUCCIO,
GIUSEPPE TO LUCREZIA,
EGISTO TO LUCREZIA,
LUCREZIA TO GIUSEPPE,
LUCREZIA TO EGISTO,
ALBINA TO GIUSEPPE,
EGISTO TO LUCREZIA,
EGISTO TO LUCREZIA,
GIUSEPPE TO LUCREZIA,
GIUSEPPE TO LUCREZIA,
LUCREZIA TO GIUSEPPE,
GIUSEPPE TO LUCREZIA,
FERRUCCIO TO GIUSEPPE,
GIUSEPPE TO PIERO,
ALBINA TO GIUSEPPE,
GIUSEPPE TO LUCREZIA AND PIERO,
PIERO TO GIUSEPPE,
EGISTO AND ALBINA TO GIUSEPPE,
GIUSEPPE TO LUCREZIA,
ROBERTA TO ALBERICO,
GIUSEPPE TO ROBERTA,
ROBERTA TO ALBERICO,
ALBERICO TO ROBERTA,
ROBERTA TO ALBERICO,
PIERO AND LUCREZIA TO GIUSEPPE,
ALBINA TO SERENA,
SERENA TO ALBINA,
GIUSEPPE TO LUCREZIA,
ALBERICO TO GIUSEPPE,
GIUSEPPE TO ALBERICO,
ROBERTA TO GIUSEPPE,
LUCREZIA TO GIUSEPPE,
GIUSEPPE TO ROBERTA,
PIERO TO GIUSEPPE,
IGNAZIO FEGIZ TO GIUSEPPE,
GIUSEPPE TO IGNAZIO FEGIZ,
ALBERICO TO GIUSEPPE,
GIUSEPPE TO ALBERICO,
EGISTO TO GIUSEPPE,
LUCREZIA TO GIUSEPPE,
GIUSEPPE TO LUCREZIA,
ALBINA TO EGISTO,
EGISTO TO ALBINA,
PIERO TO GIUSEPPE,
GIUSEPPE TO PIERO,
EGISTO TO ALBINA,
ROBERTA TO GIUSEPPE,
LUCREZIA TO GIUSEPPE,
ROBERTA TO GIUSEPPE,
GIUSEPPE TO LUCREZIA,
ALBERICO TO GIUSEPPE,
GIUSEPPE TO ALBERICO,
SERENA TO EGISTO,
LUCREZIA TO GIUSEPPE,
LUCREZIA TO GIUSEPPE,
GIUSEPPE TO LUCREZIA,
LUCREZIA TO GIUSEPPE,
ROBERTA TO GIUSEPPE,
EGISTO TO ALBINA,
ALBINA TO EGISTO,
EGISTO TO ALBINA,
GIUSEPPE TO LUCREZIA,
ROBERTA TO GIUSEPPE,
LUCREZIA TO GIUSEPPE,
LUCREZIA TO GIUSEPPE,
LUCREZIA TO GIUSEPPE,
GIUSEPPE TO LUCREZIA,
LUCREZIA TO GIUSEPPE,
GIUSEPPE TO ALBINA,
LUCREZIA TO GIUSEPPE,
GIUSEPPE TO ALBERICO,
ALBERICO TO GIUSEPPE,
ROBERTA TO GIUSEPPE,
LUCREZIA TO GIUSEPPE,
EGISTO TO GIUSEPPE,
EGISTO TO GIUSEPPE,
GIUSEPPE TO ALBERICO,
ALBERICO TO GIUSEPPE,
LUCREZIA TO GIUSEPPE,
GIUSEPPE TO LUCREZIA,
EGISTO TO GIUSEPPE,
GIUSEPPE TO EGISTO,
LUCREZIA TO GIUSEPPE,
ALBINA TO GIUSEPPE,
GIUSEPPE TO LUCREZIA,
ROBERTA TO GIUSEPPE,
LUCREZIA TO GIUSEPPE,
ALBERICO TO GIUSEPPE,
GIUSEPPE TO ALBERICO,
PIERO TO GIUSEPPE,
EGISTO TO IGNAZIO FEGIZ,
EGISTO TO ALBINA,
GIUSEPPE TO LUCREZIA,
LUCREZIA TO GIUSEPPE,
What People are Saying About This
The secret of Natalia’s simple prose and style and its poetic tension are born out of essential disproportion.