The City and the House (March 2023)
“The telephone isn’t made for saying important things that need time and space.”
Happiness, as Such (August 2024)
The merit of Natalia Ginzburg’s epistolary novels — whether they are wholly or partially comprised of an exchange of letters between characters — is their being time capsules of an age when corresponding through letters was the principal means of remote communication. It was in letters that banalities could be reported as much as consequential information, and people were allowed space to be frank. Letters tracked the growth, or stagnation, of their writers. Self-expression flowed freely where individual and shared stories unfolded. Ginzburg seems to have maximized on the medium and preserved it, foreknowing a time, our time, when letter writing would be at the point of near extinction.
Voices in the Evening (January 2024)
Of sad loves and sad lives. For me to truly appreciate Ginzburg’s work and write something of worth about it is, perhaps, to regard it as a whole after I’ve read everything she’s ever written.
For now, this book only evokes a specific memory:
He and I had just listened to the whiskey-soaked voice of Tom Waits. We said we did not want to end up like the people sung by the raspy voice.
But we can’t really predict life, we agreed.
We can only try, I said.
We did not try hard enough.
The Book-Butterfly 