Ginzburg’s writing is like facing a mirror and seeing your most important and mundane feelings reflected back at you in a quotidian fashion. The product of this is an exploration of the human experience. The ease with which she presents thoughts and experiences puts the reader in a trance so one doesn’t feel as though they are reading. Her stories initially feel inconsequential but produce meaning at unexpected moments.
I am most grateful for her short stories in The Little Virtues which I’ve devoured time and time again. “Winter in The Abruzzi” captures the feeling of reliability and comfort in negative emotions: “Every day homesickness grew in us. Sometimes it was even pleasant, like being in gently slightly intoxicating company”. She makes clear the attraction to negativity and the corrupting force that it is. Through personification, she gives life to emotion, suggesting that emotions take up at least as much space as people do in someone’s life.
“Worn out shoes” is filled with the irony of being a parent, wanting your child to have “dry, warm feet” as opposed to your own “soft and shapeless” worn-out shoes. This story is about the friendship between Ginzburg and another woman, born through similarity. Both believe in a life that is sometimes uncomfortable but never static.
“England: Eulogy and Lament” is an honest portrait of London. Ginzburg portrays a constant city, bringing comfort to a place that many consider the opposite. The intentionality of the city is juxtaposed with the natural Italian landscape, here, her positionality is apparent, emphasising the role of our environments in how we see the world and our inability to detach the two.
Part two is jarring as the backdrop of the war becomes central to Ginzburg’s everyday life. She explains the trauma of war: “Once the experience of evil has been endured it is never forgotten” in “The Son of a Man”. The last of her short stories have a more didactic quality; Ginzburg describes what it feels like to find your calling in “My Vocation,” she notes the surety with which she writes, indisputable because of a deep belief in the works she produces. ‘The Little Virtues’ placed at the end of the anthology, is essentially a critique of parenting and what it should be; a role of no expectation and complete surrender. Family Lexicon is the most well-known of Ginzburg’s works and offers a look into her life and the people that shape it. Even still, her own opinions are obscured by the thoughts and personalities that surround her. All Our Yesterdays, being a work of fiction, is the least obvious in its core lessons, still, it is a portrayal of relationships and life, once more in the backdrop of Fascist Italy during WWII.
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