The Road to the City - Natalia Ginzburg

The Road to the City by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Gini Alhadeff / ISBN 9780811234757 / 88-page hardback from New Directions, published 2023

***

A magnificently stark book--within the smallness of one poor, muddled, provincial life, Natalia Ginzburg finds enormous pain and loss

An almost unbearably intimate novella, The Road to the City concentrates on a young woman barely awake to life, who fumbles through her days: she is fickle yet kind, greedy yet abashed, stupidly ambitious yet loving too―she is a mass of confusion. She’s in a bleak space, lit with the hard clarity of a Pasolini film. Her family is no help: her father is largely absent; her mother is miserable; her sister’s unhappily promiscuous; her brothers are in a separate masculine world. Only her cousin Nini seems to see her. She falls into disgrace and then “marries up,” but without any joy, blind to what was beautiful right before her own eyes.

The Road to the City was Ginzburg’s very first work, originally published under a pseudonym. “I think it might be her best book,” her translator Gini Alhadeff remarked: “And apparently she thought so, too, at the end of her life, when assembling a complete anthology of her work for Mondadori."

"The voice of the Italian novelist and essayist Natalia Ginzburg comes to us with absolute clarity amid the veils of time and language. Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like. This voice emerges from her preoccupations and themes, whose specificity and universality she considers with a gravitas and authority that seem both familiar and entirely original." ― Rachel Cusk

"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

"Her prose style is deceptively simple and very complex. Its effect on the reader is both calming and thrilling―that’s not so easy to do." ― Deborah Levy

"A bleak and smarting read, a remarkable debut." ― Naomi Huffman, New York Times