Two of the early essays in Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg are about London in the early 1960s, the melancholy, desolation, lack of imagination, and the depressing food. She admires the get-up of old ladies in evening wear, and otherwise can find nothing to like.
Beryl Bainbridge in The Bottle Factory Outing speaks for this England. Employees at an Italian bottle factory in London go on an outing: big blonde Freda, mousier Brenda, fumbling Rossi, aloof Vittorio, Patrick who'd fix a leaking toilet. Seediness turns nasty. I keep putting the book down. Natalia and Beryl. Even their names fight each other. I read Little Virtues twice on our ten day trip to Portugal, struggled to finish The Bottle Factory Outing. Promise of worse in a seedy world is not the best for spring travel.
The last three essays in Little Virtues are wonderful. I read them in a strange agony of appreciation, so easily can recognition turn to pain. The best was reading on the beach at Cacela Velha, the second or third time. P was practicing tightrope walking on the sand without a rope but with a balancing pole. The empty beach with very fine sand and a calligraphy of grasses crisscrossed by black beetles making long work of our lunch crumbs, draws in every empty beach I've known, Natalia Ginzburg draws in my thoughts about human relationships and silence. And the sun shines. I've chosen the house over the water where I would stay or live, the oldest of them, nearly buried in pines.
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