The Road to the City
Natalia Ginzburg
(Author)
Gini Alhadeff
(Translator)
21,000+ Reviews
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Description
An almost unbearably intimate novella, The Road to the City concentrates on a young woman barely awake to life, who fumbles through her days: she is fickle yet kind, greedy yet abashed, stupidly ambitious yet loving too--she is a mass of confusion. She's in a bleak space, lit with the hard clarity of a Pasolini film. Her family is no help: her father is largely absent; her mother is miserable; her sister's unhappily promiscuous; her brothers are in a separate masculine world. Only her cousin Nini seems to see her. She falls into disgrace and then "marries up," but without any joy, blind to what was beautiful right before her own eyes. The Road to the City was Ginzburg's very first work, originally published under a pseudonym. "I think it might be her best book," her translator Gini Alhadeff remarked: "And apparently she thought so, too, at the end of her life, when assembling a complete anthology of her work for Mondadori.
Product Details
Price
$18.95
$17.62
Publisher
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date
July 04, 2023
Pages
96
Dimensions
6.2 X 9.1 X 0.5 inches | 0.65 pounds
Language
English
Type
Hardcover
EAN/UPC
9780811234757
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About the Author
Natalia Ginzburg was born in Palermo, Italy in 1916. She was an Italian author whose work explored family relationships, politics during and after the Fascist years and World War II, and philosophy. She wrote novels, short stories, and essays, for which she received the Strega Prize and Bagutta Prize. Modest and intensely reserved, Ginzburg never shied away from the traumas of history, whether writing about the Turin of her childhood, the Abruzzi countryside, or contemporary Rome--all the while approaching those traumas only indirectly, through the mundane details and catastrophes of personal life. Most of her works were also translated into English and published in the United Kingdom and United States. She wrote acclaimed translations of both Proust and Flaubert into Italian. She died in Rome in 1991.
Gini Alhadeff published a memoir, The Sun at Midday: Tales of a Mediterranean Family, and a novel, Diary of a Djinn. She was born in Alexandria, Egypt, of Italian parents. She is completing The Magic Horn, about a Swiss-American psychiatrist and her therapeutic sculpture garden at Bellevue Hospital.
Reviews
The voice of the Italian novelist and essayist Natalia Ginzburg comes to us with absolute clarity amid the veils of time and language. Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like. This voice emerges from her preoccupations and themes, whose specificity and universality she considers with a gravitas and authority that seem both familiar and entirely original.--Rachel Cusk
I'm utterly entranced by Ginzburg's style--her mysterious directness, her salutary ability to lay things bare that never feels contrived or cold, only necessary, honest, clear.--Maggie Nelson
Her prose style is deceptively simple and very complex. Its effect on the reader is both calming and thrilling--that's not so easy to do.--Deborah Levy
A bleak and smarting read, a remarkable debut.--Naomi Huffman "New York Times"
Ginzburg's view of family is so unsentimental, it's visionary...The Road may be a small story about a small place, but Ginzburg's clarity lends grandeur to Delia's plight.--Diane Josefowicz "Necessary Fiction"
The youngest of five, Ginzburg writes like someone used to being interrupted, precisely observing daily life with a sibling's affectionate revenge. Her work is marked by a kind of atmospheric pressure.--Jessi Jezewska Stevens "4Columns"
Ginzburg has an incredible talent for depicting explosive clashes within families, integrating insight and humour into her narrative...this lemon of a book invites one to take a bite, to relish the burn.--Catherine Xinxin Yu "Asymptote Journal"
A blister of violence lurks tense beneath the words, the skin of it wearing thin, ready to be popped.--Rhian Sasseen "LitHub"
I'm utterly entranced by Ginzburg's style--her mysterious directness, her salutary ability to lay things bare that never feels contrived or cold, only necessary, honest, clear.--Maggie Nelson
Her prose style is deceptively simple and very complex. Its effect on the reader is both calming and thrilling--that's not so easy to do.--Deborah Levy
A bleak and smarting read, a remarkable debut.--Naomi Huffman "New York Times"
Ginzburg's view of family is so unsentimental, it's visionary...The Road may be a small story about a small place, but Ginzburg's clarity lends grandeur to Delia's plight.--Diane Josefowicz "Necessary Fiction"
The youngest of five, Ginzburg writes like someone used to being interrupted, precisely observing daily life with a sibling's affectionate revenge. Her work is marked by a kind of atmospheric pressure.--Jessi Jezewska Stevens "4Columns"
Ginzburg has an incredible talent for depicting explosive clashes within families, integrating insight and humour into her narrative...this lemon of a book invites one to take a bite, to relish the burn.--Catherine Xinxin Yu "Asymptote Journal"
A blister of violence lurks tense beneath the words, the skin of it wearing thin, ready to be popped.--Rhian Sasseen "LitHub"
