All Our Yesterdays

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Mai devi domandarmi (1970). Never Must You Ask Me, transl. Isabel Quigly (1970) – mostly articles published in La Stampa between 1968-1979 It may be fair to say that credit for this renewed interest in Ginzburg’s work should go first and foremost to the decision taken by Daunt book publishing to republish her best-known works: in 2018 The Little Virtues – from which Rooney draws his exergue for his novel Beautiful World, Where Are You? – and Family Lexicon , and, in 2019, Voices in the Evening . Laura Feigel wrote in the Guardian ,

It’s the story of two Italian families in the time leading up to and during WW II – roughly 1939 to 1945. One family is rich (they own the leather factory in town), and the family next door is middle class. Both have lots of kids and in Ginzburg’s style, all are flawed. Even toddlers in her novel are angry or manipulative or silent and so are all the adults flawed – in personality and in appearance.But there’s not a lot about the war. Mostly the story is about the lives and loves of this large family -- mostly the loves, mainly unrequited. In fact the main story loosely revolves around a young woman who loves a man her entire life, but he does not love her. They eventually have an affair but he’s emotionless. At one point they even become engaged, but he’s just going through the motions. He cruelly tells her in so many words: I’ve never loved you; I can never love you; I can’t love any woman, but if you want to get married, I’ll do it.

The story takes place over one year—October through October of the following year. The story follow a large Italian family consisting of brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and each one’s respective e spouse. We are TOLD what they do but little comes across in relation to what kind of person they are. We are occasionally told X is cheerful, Y is melancholy and X smart, but we are given little evidence of why such statements are true. The only person for whom I recognized a character trait is the narrator’s mother. She continually gripes about her health. We are told umpteen times that she has a lump in her throat and that the doctor told her she had high blood pressure, having always had low blood pressure before. Almost the exact same words are used over and over again. In this respect, the writing is repetitive. What we are told about the characters is primarily what they do. In a novel, I want to observe the decisions characters make. This helps me form an opinion about who they are. I like character studies—you do not get that here. There are too many characters and too little information is provided about each. The information provided is told rather than shown. The audiobook begins with an introduction, an author’s note and a translator’s note. These feel like fillers in an effort to make a short story longer. The introduction should be placed at the end. I don’t want to be told what to think until after I have drawn my own conclusions.Cenzo Rena’s patronising pronouncement fails to comprehend the power of belonging to a “swarm”: the value of sharing and moving together, with a joint mission. He has already declared that he is no communist, for the most trivial of reasons (“he had a horror of living with anyone and for that reason Communism would never suit him, for he had been told that a large number of people had to live together in the same house”). Anna, who is young yet knows her mind, understands what it is to feel part of a force for change. She remembers sitting round a table with her lively, politically active brothers – even if, like Ginzburg, she was doing more listening than talking. It is only around the middle of the novel that the story starts to gain momentum, not coincidentally when the war really breaks out and the protagonists are pulled along. But even now the style remains sober and business-like, in a continuous stream of relatively short sentences, descriptive, without dialogues, and again with subdued emotion; not even when really dramatic things happen towards the end of the war. The main characters just undergo what is happening, barely understand what is going on, have no control over their lives. A panoramic, richly satisfying story of two Italian families as their lives are inexorably shaped by the encroaching war … A terrific discovery.’ The Jewish Chronicle