All Our Yesterdays

Like a whisper amplified in a courtyard, Natalia Ginzburg's novel of war and love in World War II Italy resonates with understatement, building from a monologue of normalcy to a shout of anguish. "All Our Yesterdays" is the story of two families, neighbors in a small town in Italy whose lives become intertwined by affairs of the heart and mind, politics and sex, and by the ultimate commonality: death. Anna, the youngest daughter of the poorer family, becomes the central figure in this epic, and when she finds herself pregnant by the unthinking neighbor boy she agrees to marry an "uncle" who will provide for her. "Up till that day she had lived like an insect," Ginzburg writes. "An insect that knows nothing beyond the leaf upon which it hangs." Cenzo Rena, Anna's new husband, pledges to show her the world, but instead the world comes to them when German forces occupy their village, and the passive Anna finds herself caught in the unrelenting movement of war. In Angus Davidson's translation of Ginzburg's spare, luminous prose, life-shattering events avoid melodrama through straightforward rendering. Just as Cenzo Rena finds it impossible to hate the Germans on an individual level once a soldier stumbles into their kitchen, Ginzburg's cry for peace finds its most powerful argument in the mundane details, in deft and sympathetic characterizations of flawed humanity, and through the "insect-like" observations of Anna. The story flows through family connections with the fluidity of gossip, but with none of the condemnation. During a decade when war disrupts so much of "everyday life" in townships worldwide, it is worthwhile to rediscover a book like "All Our Yesterdays" which lets us in the front doors of ordinary families and leaves us sorting through their dirty laundry with a shock of recognition, with empathy, and with the desire to open our own doors to them.