#RivetingReviews: West Camel reviews FAMILY and BORGHESIA by Natalia Ginzburg

There is a melancholy at the heart of both Family and Borghesia, but in neither novella does the source of this sadness become clear until the story’s close.

Published late in Ginzburg’s career, the sadness in Family appears to stem from the breakdown of the traditional family unit, and its subsequent, and seemingly unsatisfactory, reconfiguration. Ivana and Carmine are an unconventional couple. Once lovers, they had a child together who died – the tragedy ultimately driving them apart. Yet, despite their new partners, new children and different life paths, they gravitate towards each other. During a bout of pneumonia Carmine reflects on their relationship:

‘In the course of that long afternoon, while his temperature was climbing, he found himself thinking that the best part of his existence was Ivana and all that surrounded her. No other source gave him that vital something which made him more intelligent, less ordinary and stronger’

Carmine and Ivana’s strength seems to provide the gravitational centre around which the cast of friends, hangers-on and extended-family members orbit. Yet happiness for them is elusive, even though they find a solace in each other’s company they can’t find elsewhere.

It is only at the end of the novella, when we return to the opening scene, in which we are introduced to Ivana and Carmine, that Ginzburg reveals the source of the story’s overarching melancholy: that Sunday they spent together was the day Carmine began to feel unwell – the first symptoms of the disease that will soon kill him.

Borghesia is a similar examination of a family, and is haunted by a similar air of sadness. The widow Ilaria and her comfortable, bourgeois, extended family live separately but together, in flats in the same building, sharing meals and servants and their apparently minor concerns.

As her wealthy brother-in-law finds a wife, and then her daughter separates from her bohemian husband, it seems that Ilaria is more concerned about the welfare of the cats she, late in life, has come to care for. Yet she doesn’t find any particular happiness in this pursuit. When she tries to discover a cat’s background, ‘which house Fur was born in and what kind of people lived there’, she is struck by sorrow:

‘It was a strange, poor sort of sadness. She thought to herself how everything that bound people to animals and animals to people was strange, poor, sad and mysterious.’

As the story comes to an end, Lulla, one of Ilaria’s cats, has kittens in her bed – ‘It was during the night, and so Ilaria lay asleep, surrounded by tiny kittens that looked like white mice’. Shortly after, Ilaria is taken to a clinic after fainting in the street and discovers she has lung cancer. Despite the protestations of her family, Ilaria is convinced she’s facing death. In fact, we learn that ‘she had started to think about dying from the moment Riri sent her that first little cat in a shoebox’ – the scene that opens the book. The source of the great melancholy that pervades Borghesia is revealed, in just the same way it was in Family.

These are small, quiet stories about families and their everyday responses to the little challenges of life, yet through understatement, forensic observation and distilled emotion, Ginzburg elevates them to the level of existential reflection. Not least in this image from the end of Borghesia:

On the day Ilaria dies, her daughter visits her mother’s flat to find ‘the kittens, with their wide brown ears and sharp pointed faces … sitting in the gravest possible silence.’

Reviewed by West Camel

FAMILY and BORGHESIA

Written by Natalia Ginzburg

Translated by Beryl Stockman

Published by Daunt Books (2024)

September 2024 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

West Camel is a writer, reviewer and editor. He edited Dalkey Archive’s Best European Fiction 2015 and is currently working for Orenda Books. He has written two novels, Attend and Fall. He is the editor of the Riveter magazine and the #RivetingReviews for the European Literature Network.

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