The novel goes on to follow Anna’s relationships with her family, with the inhabitants of the “house opposite” and with an older family friend named Cenzo Rena, before and during the war. She was a plump girl, pale and indolent, dressed in a pleated skirt and a faded blue pullover, and not very tall for her fourteen years.

I bought this one last month on the strength of having read The Dry Heart, which was my first Ginsburg. her novels are sometimes touted as being quite Pym-like in style, but she’s quite prejudiced in terms of class dynamics to the point where I don’t think I can read read her any more. But as readers, we have the chance to see a few of these people, under unimaginable pressure, with chaos and violence everywhere around them, responding with transcendent and unforgettable moral beauty. Gaila, nes lūkesčius buvau visai užsikėlusi, bet tai turbūt tik dar vienas priminimas, kad kartais geriau į knygą nerti nieko nežinant ir nesileisti apgaunamai anotacijų.

em 1952 que Ginzburg, casada já pela segunda vez - o primeiro marido, Leone, judeu e combatente anti-fascista, foi também ele vítima dos nazis - publica esta nostálgica e pungente obra Todos Os Nossos Ontens, cuja atmosfera é intensa, palpitante, quente e fumarenta: a cada parágrafo sentimos adensar-se e aproximar-se um destino inevitável. Ginzburg’s work is concerned, it seems to me more than anything, with the distinction between what is right and what is wrong.

To me, All Our Yesterdays is a perfect novel, which is to say, it is completely what it is attempting to be, and nothing else. In 1938, at the age of 22, Natalia married the Jewish anti-fascist organiser Leone Ginzburg, and they went on to have three children together. He [Cenzo Rena] looked out of the window at the refugees from Naples who were now going hither and thither about the lanes of the village, carrying mattresses and babies, he looked and said how sad it was to see all these mattresses carried about here and there all over Italy, Italy was now pouring mattresses out of her ravaged houses. That’s a fair point about the novel feeling like an ensemble piece, especially the first section where the focus moves around from one character to another (Ippolito really stands out there too).Anna is by this time married, a young mother, helping to conceal fugitives from the fascist regime in the cellar of her home. The final lines of the book see the survivors ‘thinking … of the long, difficult life which they saw in front of them now, full of all the things they did not know how to do’. It's an idea that is profoundly offensive to every luckless individual who died at the hands of the Nazis. I will look forward to reading those novels to be sure, but this was my introduction to Natalia Ginzburg and I loved the book.