#RivetingReviews: West Camel reviews THE CITY AND THE HOUSE by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Dick Davis

Ginzburg’s final novel is replete with substitutions. The book’s inciting incident is it’s central character, Giuseppe’s decision to abandon his life in Rome – his apartment, his group of close friends, his visits to the country house of his former lover, Lucrezia – and substitute it with a new life with his brother in Princeton, USA.

Back in Italy, his place in the group of friends is taken by a louder, more argumentative version of Giuseppe: Ignazio Fegiz. Later in the novel, Lucrezia replaces Giuseppe as her lover with Ignazio Fegiz, and then attempts, unsuccessfully, to replace her long-suffering husband Piero with Ignazio. Elsewhere, characters move into each other’s apartments; the house of the title is eventually turned into a hotel; lives in the country are substituted for lives in the city. And Giuseppe himself marries his brother’s widow, only to replace her in his affections with her adult daughter. Most tragically there are two ‘substitute’ killings – both involving characters who are not the killers’ targets.

Ginzburg intentions with these multiple and varied substitutions are perhaps revealed by a thought from Giuseppe early in the book, before he departs Rome. Having wandered the city, saying goodbye to the familiar sights, he declares:

‘In America there will be other squares and tourists, beggars and sirens. But they will mean nothing to me because a man can only make so many things his own during his life. At a certain point in our lives everything we see for the first time is external to us. We look at it like tourists, with interest but coldly. It belongs to other people.’

Whatever substitutions we make over the years, Ginzburg seems to say, none of them will replace those experiences, places and relationships we form in early life.

This sense is carried through to the end of the book: Giuseppe, after several years in Princeton, declares the house he lives in as ‘profoundly alien to me’, and his step-daughter, Chantal, describes him as ‘someone outside of reality’. What does seem real for Giuseppe, though, what does seem his own, is his former life in Rome. Indeed throughout the book, the characters look back to the weekends they spent at the country house in Monte Fermo, to walks in the woods there, to meals taken together in Rome, to a time when Lucrezia and Giuseppe were lovers and Piero allowed, and even encouraged, the affair. But all of this happened before the book began, and the sense that these characters are growing older, their youth, and therefore their reality, retreating into the past, gives a profound sense of the loss that comes with ageing.

Another explanation for Ginzburg’s focus on what is our own and what is external to us – what is real and what is simply a substitute – can be found in the form this book takes. It is an epistolary novel – letters sent between the characters, most often to and from Giuseppe. These are the characters’ own words to the friends they’ve known for years. They are honest, blunt, sometimes hurtful, sometimes sympathetic. They relay the facts of the present, and reflect on their memories of the past. But always, as in any personal letter, they express their own reality, and view ‘with interest but coldly’ what is external to them.

The knowing narrator of most of Ginzburg’s previous fiction seems to have taken a step back in her final novel and allowed her characters to speak for themselves. She has substituted their voices for her own. Perhaps it is telling that between writing The City and the House and her death Ginzburg would write only plays. Perhaps in her later life, reality seemed external to her – belonging to other people.

Reviewed by West Camel

THE CITY AND THE HOUSE

Written by Natalia Ginzburg

Translated from the Italian by Dick Davis

Published by Daunt Books (2025)

June 2025 #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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