All Our Yesterdays

This one sneaked up on me. It’s the story of two bourgeois families, neighbors in a Northern Italian town, beginning with the deaths of both patriarchs and following the second generation as it comes of age and World War II comes to the country. Propelled by Ginzburg’s deceptively breezy style—plain language and charming humor—I doubted her young characters were substantial enough to bear the weight of unfolding history. Also, unlike Elena Ferrante’s melodrama, Ginzburg practices the opposite, relating traumatic events calmly and deploying single images or repeated phrases freighted with all the suppressed emotion. By the time the survivors were reunited in the old neighborhood, I was oddly surprised how their accrued layers of experience had given them density and war had aged them much more than the five years that had passed. I also realized I was in the presence of one of Italy’s best, a true literary lioness.