Natalia Ginzburg, All Our Yesterdays

 I finished Natalia Ginzburg, All Our Yesterdays, on the last day of our holiday in Portugal, and was left wondering how she gave us a sense of intimacy with these people, and the war, and the land, without ever seeming to dwell long enough for us to know them, the people, the war, and the land. Yet there is an insistence, as people appear and disappear, marry unsuitably or oddly or not at all, grow old or die or think about how dying would be all right if it happened. We don't need to be told what people's feelings are because the onwardness of events takes the place of individuals and the feelings they might have. Or feelings are not the point. Onwardness, history, the interleaving of people, not even families particularly, any mesh of friends, neighbours, acquaintances. There's a coolness, distance, a looking outward at the broad flow of events, marriage, a baby here or there. Writing is a way of keeping going, not involving, urged by detail, little teeth like a wolf, a mother who works in a cake shop, or arrives from foreign parts with chocolates, goes away to school.

The quietly main character, Anna, becomes pregnant at 16, and marries an older man, a friend of her father's, who tells her a number of times, as most descriptive things like the little teeth of a wolf or a crooked smile or hair like chicken feathers, are said a number of times, that she is an insect and he just a big leaf on which she rests. He hoped she would become a strong woman but she was still an insect who didn't know how to do anything except perch on a big leaf. He is killed at the end of the book, at the end of the war, by the Germans. So, her big leaf gone, with one of her brothers and one of the family from across the road, she considers the long war and the sorrow and noise and confusion, and the long difficult life which they saw in front of them now, full of all the things they did not know how to do.

The chapter when Anna is dealing with, or ignoring, the fact that she is pregnant, about halfway through the book, is one of the few internal moments.

She thought how she had neither father nor mother, and how she had found her brother dead on a seat and how she had a baby inside her. But she had not the courage to tell anybody about the baby, nor had she the courage to go and look for a midwife in the town. It seemed to her that she would have courage only for starting a revolution.

The internal shifts quickly to the external. From the baby inside her to the revolution she might start. This is how we determine what is important. Abruptly. At times you'd least expect.

Our holiday went into a third week because we missed the plane home. There was a strike at the airport. The next day I started reading Natalia Ginzburg again, at first just sentences or paragraphs here and there, then outright I was reading the whole of the second half again, unwilling to leave these people behind, finding the emphases with pleasure, the insect face, the crooked smile and the little wolf teeth, threading the book like pearls.