Posts filed under 'family'

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Riversong by Wendy Delorme

June 24, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Kathryn Raver

I seek only those flammable things from which a story might be made.

Ever kept a secret way longer than you thought you would? A year? Two? What about seven? In this novel excerpt from French author Wendy Delorme, brilliantly translated by Asymptote’s own Kathryn Raver, a story of a love unspoken becomes a story about the nature of literature itself, and the parallels between writing and self-creation. Isolated in a mountain cabin, an unnamed writer reflects back on the years leading up to their relationship with their now-lover. At first hesitant to confess her feelings, she instead watches her friend’s gender transition unfold over the course of several years, only to find that as their voice and appearance change, her feelings for them deepen. When, after a an encounter on a rainy night, her feelings finally come to light, it sparks an epistolary conversation that will change both their lives. Read on!

A restless night. Sleep escapes me, but the words don’t come either. What does come is the thought of writing to you. I’m thinking again of how we met. How we really met. That night where I knew I wanted you.

Sometimes, a person comes along and we see them. Truly see them, I mean. Our perspective changes. Our line of sight suddenly sharpens, like that of an animal scrutinizing the brush to see what moves within. Our retinae focus, taking in details that up until that point had blurred together into a hazy landscape. The eye becomes curious and searches for more, latches onto a mouth, the clean line of an eyebrow, the velvety texture of a cheek, a shoulder muscle, a manner of smiling. This sort of gaze, when it lands on another, radically changes the bond two people share.

What turned my gaze on its head, that night? READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Buckle by Nirha Efendić

April 22, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Ellen Elias-Bursać

I don’t think that having to prove oneself is right; you break yourself but the people around you see only what they care to see.

Too often, stories about war sensationalize the trauma it inflicts—the dead reduced to numbers, the survivors to lists of symptoms. Not so the work of Bosnian writer Nirha Efendić, whose autobiographical novel Buckle, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać, offers a compelling vision of what such narratives often omit: the shunning of refugees, the punishments of a post-war economy, the daily psychic grind of living as an undesired and unforeseen survivor. The nature of the narrative is best described by Bosnian author Faruk Šehić, as “. . . a documentary-like, autobiographical work of prose with elements of fiction”—the early chapters narrated by various members of the protagonist Nirha’s family, the later narrated by Nirha alone, following the death of her father and brother in the Srebrenica genocide. The excerpts below are taken from the middle of the novel, following Nirha’s attempts to find her footing after she is finally separated from her father and brother. Of these passages, Elias-Bursać writes: “The challenge in working on this translation was to convey the nuanced sense of the narrator’s grace, strength and gentility as she speaks of such wrenching, tragic subjects.” Read on—

All morning long, Mama and I worked on stitching sturdy yellow cloth for rucksacks. Mama had a Singer sewing machine that my grandfather bought her while she was still in elementary school so she could learn the trade over summer vacation.

Now she was determined to teach me how to sew.

She thought it might come in handy at some point. We knew we had to stuff our whole past into the backpacks, at least the most important parts of it, and set off into the unknown.

This wasn’t easy. There were shells raining down all around us.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Auntie with Two Laughing Braids” by Hoda AbdelKader Mahmoud

March 25, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Jennifer Jean and Mohamed ElSawi Hassan

My vast darkness is lit with memories of my mother's hand

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a poem by Egyptian writer Hoda AbdelKader Mahmoud, translated by Mohamed ElSawi Hassan and Jennifer Jean. Simultaneously delighted by the temerity of a young interlocutor and agonizing over her own age and childlessness, the unnamed narrator of this poem faces herself in the mirror and worries about her frown lines, takes pleasure in the perfect skirt, and feels a wash of nostalgia at the sound of an old song. Torn between comfort in her new identity—the Auntie!—and anxiety over her future, she finds solace in the memory of her own mother and female ancestors, with whom she shares a bond through time, and beyond age.

You are old, Auntie!
This phrase delights, then turns me to face the mirror.
My heart is obliged to follow, every time, and
I catch it red-handed, in a small panic.
I joke with it about the idea of wrinkles and sagging breasts.
My hormones are still the same from late childhood!
And the fact that aging does not come.
If it does, it confirms my beloved will never arrive,
and that Auntie will never be replaced with Mom. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Frames of Silent Walls” by Pınar Yıldız

October 29, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Pınar Yıldız

Those voices and looks were as if they had been there forever and would remain there forever.

This week’s story, both written in and translated from the original Zazaki by Pınar Yıldız, is firmly confined within the walls of its narrator’s house. The photographs decorating the interiors offer an occasion for reflection on familial history for the narrator, who is suffocated by the silence that dominates the “soilless cemetery” of their home. These portraits, a collage of family members and Kurdish folk heroes, are portals into memories of a lush childhood, when the images seemed to manifest a corporeal existence, infusing the household with their vigorous commentary. Once, they held the power to influence the animate world; now, they are simply still lifes. The passage of time, resisted by the frozen shots, is instead measured by the tapering volume of their voices. Through reflections on preservation and vitality, Yıldız ponders what keeps a house, and a family, alive.

The walls of our house, like the walls of many other houses, were like a soilless cemetery. The unfortunate lives got stuck to the walls. It was as if the walls wanted to open their mouths and speak, but they were frozen like soulless frames. A silence spread from the walls into the house. Most of the time, like those frames, we would freeze without saying a single word. Like those photographs hanging on the walls, it was as if we were frozen in a different world.

Only three of the photographs hanging on the walls of our house had not been inside that soilless cemetery; they were struggling to live in a corner. One was Ahmet Kaya’s photo. With his saz (baglama) in his hand and his enthusiastic and hopeful smile, it was as if that photo had made him greater than death while he was still alive. The other photo was of my brother Roni, who had just started school. That photo of Roni in his blue apron was also very precious to my mother, just like Roni himself. Roni, born in the millennium century, looked at the camera with a look as if he was lost in worry and thought. The photograph of my father and Sheikh Necmettin taken by the sea in a distant city has been hanging on the wall in a frame for a long time, and liveliness and life radiated from this photograph. In that photo, Sheikh Necmettin did not look like a sheikh, but like a human being, a gentleman. He was not as old as he is now. I do not know why the sheikh, who I thought never left his big house with a courtyard, had been to that distant country. Maybe Sheikh Necmettin brought those pink hard candies from that distant land by the sea. Maybe he would keep those candies in his pocket as a souvenir from those days and distribute those candies not only to children but to everyone.

Apart from the photographs, calendars and timetables from the month of Ramadan were also lined up on the walls. I remembered the blue walls of my grandparents’ house. Calendars and timetables hung on the walls of their house too. An embroidered towel and a mirror always hung on the edge of the stove. The shape and model of the mirror never changed, but sometimes the surroundings of the mirror were blue and sometimes red. I never saw when the mirror was broken or replaced with a new one.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Woman to Make Over the World” by Antoine Charbonneau-Demers

October 1, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Trask Roberts

If I want to make over the world, it must start with me.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present to you a short story by Antoine Charbonneau-Demers, translated from the French by Trask Roberts. In it, a son frantically tries to outrun his mother’s approaching death by embarking on a total makeover: an aesthetic project which requires, most crucially, a long-anticipated nose job. His dissatisfaction with his face mirrors his resentment of his Quebec hometown, polluted by chimney smoke. Both are the unappealing, defective raw materials from which he was forced to fashion his life. Yet even as he rejects his origins, he is drawn to recreate them through his physical transformation.  His ideal of beauty is, after all, his dying mother; he wishes to “breathe from the same smokestacks, taste the same exhaust fumes, the same deadly cold, the same snowy thoughts.”

At the clinic. 

—What is it about your nose that bothers you?  

If only I could come up with a good reason: I have a deviated septum, I struggle breathing, my nose keeps me from going out, from speaking—my nose, attached as it is to my windpipe, keeps me choked up, keeps me from living, plain for all to see—please, doctor, I’m begging you, fix it! But really, no, I don’t know what bothers me about my nose.  

—I don’t really like it.  

—Don’t really like it? 

—I’ve always thought the nose makes the face. So, if I fix my nose, my face will follow.  

—Yes, but… 

I start to cry. Nothing showy, nary a sniffle, no, just tears on a stolid face.   

—Young man, could it be that perhaps you’re not quite ready?  

—No, I’m crying because I hate my nose.  

READ MORE…

Held Together by Dreams: On Erminia Dell’Oro’s Abandonment

September 19, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Rose Facchini

Her characters are profoundly human, each wrestling with their own fears, hopes, and desires . . .

Abandonment by Erminia Dell’Oro, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky, Héloïse Press, 2024

Why do we leave behind people and places? Is it painful or bittersweet? Does it indicate bravery or cowardice, altruism or egoism? Do we have complete agency in these decisions or are we instead constrained by necessity, oftentimes masked by the illusion of choice? What kind of person do we become in the aftermath?

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Translation Tuesday: from “And Death Shall Have No Dominion / Killing ‘The Mother’”

July 23, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Honora Spicer

To More Deaths, more glasses raised in secret toasts.

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you an excerpt from Victoria Guerrero Peirano’s experimental novel Y la muerte no tendrá dominio, translated into English for the first time by Honora Spicer. In surreal and brutal fragments, Guerrero recounts the death of her mother in a state hospital, the two women alienated from each other not only by the physical process of death itself, but by the mediating force of medical bureaucracy. Elsewhere, Guerrero is pursued by thoughts of her pet rabbit, whose “half-dead brood” have similarly consumed her, the process of grief expanding even to overwhelm nonhuman life. Yet even at its most grim, Guerrero remains clinically attentive to the social and political forces that determine embodied experience, her oscillation between passion and restraint serving to heighten the eeriness of her prose. Read on!

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Ever since she was admitted to the Emergency Room, I kept a sort of diary. I kept note of everything the attendants baldly said. Under duress, they barely opened their mouths to say, “I’m not the one in charge.”

From that day on, death buckles and becomes something nasty, dramatic, dreadful, defining. I thought about that whole troop in white, green, or plum scrubs who disconnected patients by night, failing to give medications on time, falling asleep or going to drink. About those messengers of mortal death who instead of preparing a smooth way, impose the stoniest. They made it all the more difficult: an emotional test, a test of lucidity and endurance.

To More Deaths, more glasses raised in secret toasts.

READ MORE…

Riveting Banality: On Rebecca Gisler’s About Uncle

March 6, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Sharon Beriro

It’s the pungency of this story—the characters, the house, Uncle’s habits—that keeps us locked in tight.

About Uncle by Rebecca Gisler, translated from the French by Jordan Stump,  Two Lines Press, 2024

About Uncle is Swiss writer Rebecca Gisler’s debut novel, translated by Jordan Stump—a dazzling and intoxicating story that takes a microscopic view at the banal and unnerving details of family dynamics. A love letter to the oft hidden odd and grotesque mannerisms of our family members, About Uncle boils over with emotional distress, set just on the verge of the first COVID lockdown in spring of 2020. But, it’s not COVID that sets the tone, it’s everything else: family at its most banal, at its most crude, with an emotional tinge humming with tenderness.

At the center of the story is the unnamed narrator’s uncle, a 52 year-old recluse who seems to thrive among the squalor and filth built up over 30 years of hygienic apathy. In an unkempt house in the Brittany region of France, Uncle lives with his niece and nephew as “a congregation of do-nothings.” The siblings struggle to balance their personal struggles with their shared concern for Uncle’s health and lifestyle, and the “involuntary flatshare” is the centerpiece of a claustrophobic world that quite literally reeks of death and decay. READ MORE…

The Richness of the Fragment: An Interview with Oksana Vasyakina and Elina Alter

February 21, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Jaeyeon Yoo

I don’t believe in wholeness and I don’t believe in Chekhov’s gun. Language . . . isn't enough to reflect the fullness of the world.

What does it mean to hold grief—to physically carry your mother’s death with you in daily life? 

Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound documents the journey of a queer poet as she delivers her mother’s ashes from Moscow to Siberia. Translated from Russian by Elina Alter, the novel is an auto-fictional exploration of processing grief through language, and also a meditation on the Russian lesbian lyric—a polyphonic conversation with feminist thinkers across time and space. While making her way across Russia, the narrator weaves together a cycle of poetry, composed of recollections of her past sexual experiences and fragmented essays. Wound then began as a few pages typed alone in the dark, when Vasyakina was writing during the pandemic, and this sense—of both intimacy and intensity—persists throughout the book. Vasyakina writes, as Alter puts it, with a brutality and directness that feels “exceptionally clear-sighted.”

Wound is Vasyakina’s first novel and the winner of the 2021 NOS Prize. Since then, she has published Steppe and Rose, books that also center on family figures. In addition, her works include two collections of poetry: Женская проза (Women’s Prose) and a cycle of poetic texts titled Ветер ярости (The Wind of Fury). 

Alter is the editor-in-chief of Circumference, a journal of international culture and poetry, and has also translated It’s the End of the World, My Love by Alla Gorbunova. Her translation of Wound has been listed as one of Nylon’s Must-Reads of the Month and LGBTQ Read’s Most Anticipated Titles of the Year. 

This interview, conducted with Oksana and Elina separately, has been edited for clarity.

Jaeyeon Yoo (JY): How did Wound begin? 

Oksana Vasyakina (OV): As I rode a bus through Volgograd while carrying the urn [containing my mother’s ashes], it occurred to me that I would never be able to describe this experience. It wasn’t because the situation was tragic; I just saw how complicated it was, and I felt that I wasn’t equal to the material. This was in early 2019. 

A bit later, in the summer, I wrote a cycle of poems—which are included in the book—called “Ode to Death.” I had the desire to write, but I understood that poetry wasn’t sufficient for the challenge I saw before me. And then the pandemic began. I was shut up in my apartment, all events were canceled, all work went on Zoom. One night, I opened up my laptop and wrote the first few pages of Wound. I was writing in the dark, because it wasn’t clear to me how to write long prose, and before this I’d only written short poems, I didn’t know how to put together a novel. A week later I pulled up my draft, reread it, and understood that this was what I wanted to do, that I had to continue. 

I’m superstitious, so when I start writing a text, I name the file with a random combination of letters, just in case I never finish. But as I continued writing, I thought that the novel needed a simple name. The simplest word. The first word a child utters when it learns to speak is mama, and that was the original title of the manuscript. But some time later, I thought that mama rhymes with the word rana [“wound” in Russian]. It’s just as simple, and contains many meanings. After I wrote the scene in which the mother is lying in her coffin, I renamed the file. Since then, the book has been called Rana: Wound. 

READ MORE…

Skin Has Two Sides: Bruna Dantas Lobato on Translating Jeferson Tenório

January 11, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

. . . racism and colorism affect all of us . . . there’s no interpersonal relationship that isn’t shaped by it.

In 2023, Bruna Dantas Lobato won a PEN Translates grant for her work on Jeferson Tenório’s The Dark Side of Skin, a moving, feeling novel of how relationships—between parent and child, between lovers, between a body and a city—change, develop, and intwine against powerful institutions and worldly violences. Through the story of Pedro—which is in turn told through the life of his murdered father—Tenório vividly inscribes the urbanity of Porto Alegre and the generations that move through it, along with the cruelty, the mystery, and the love. In this interview, Lobato speaks on the novel’s treatment of racism, its refractions of Baldwin, and how its author draws on Brazil’s rich aesthetic canon.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): You’ve spoken before about how passionate you are about translating titles from the northeast of Brazil, but The Dark Side of Skin takes place in in southern Brazil—Porto Alegre—and Tenório has spoken about how the racism it describes is one that is expressed more pointedly in regards to the city’s relatively homogenous population. Could you speak a little bit about how geography or regionality works in this novel, and also about what drew you to translate it?

Bruna Dantas Lobato (BDL): The Northeast of Brazil, where I grew up, is very underrepresented in literature both in Brazil and abroad. There are very few authors from that region available in translation, especially compared to the whiter metropoles. I’d love to see a greater range of stories from different parts of Brazil in English, so we don’t keep reading the same versions of Latin America over and over again. 

I was drawn to Tenório’s novel for similar reasons, for how it presents the experience of a Black man in a predominantly white city with insight and tenderness. It’s a beautiful and painful book, and to have Tenório join the slate of Porto Alegre authors widely available in English with a different kind of book was important to me. I hope the publishers who often tell me that they already have their one Brazilian author—or one author from a certain region—will see that one voice can’t possibly represent a whole country.

XYS: A significant portion of the novel is written in the second person, which is a literary point-of-view that I think is especially sensitive to each individual language and the culture it stems from (e.g. in terms of interpersonal hierarchies, categories of persons, speech-acts). How was it working with the second person here?

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Translating Multiple Dimensions: Sarah Timmer Harvey on Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About

August 24, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Daljinder Johal

Life isn’t one-dimensional; it’s a blend of emotions, absurdity, and different tones. . .

Jente Posthuma’s striking, moving novel, What I’d Rather Not Think About, delves into the aftermath of an unthinkable loss: the death of a twin. In tracing the patchworked life of a narrator who has long thought of herself as one-half, Posthuma explores the complexities of our most intimate relationships with evocative reflection and unexpected humor. This distinct work and our July Book Club selection has been translated beautifully by Sarah Timmer Harvey, resulting in razor-sharp prose that navigates the most intricate aspects of our selfhoods—how we are with one another. In this following interview, Harvey speaks about her discovery of this novel and her translation process, as well as the intricate journey of following this book’s many thought-paths and references. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Daljinder Johal (DJ): I’m curious about your background and your journey into translation. I read that you’re Australian-born but ended up living in the Netherlands, where you began reading and occasionally translating Dutch fiction and poetry. Was there a particular work that played a significant role in sparking this interest?

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): Of course. Back then, while learning Dutch, I relocated to the Netherlands at nineteen with the intention of staying for a year. That single year evolved into a fourteen-year stay. During this time, I was working at a university, which eventually led me to translation as a second career. It happened somewhat unexpectedly. I strove to read while learning Dutch, focusing on more accessible books such as Hermann Koch’s The Dinner and even Harry Mulisch’s The Discovery of Heaven—which, while not mainstream, deeply resonated with me.

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Announcing Our July Book Club Selection: What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma

July 27, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal

Posthuma develops an affecting novel about grief by embracing its full complexity.

Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About delves into the closeness of a relationship that many find difficult to understand: the inextricable link between twin siblings. Through a delicately woven tale of memory, shared selfhood, and grief, the author takes us into the mind that struggles to understand a world shattered by loss, when one sibling dies and another is left to reconstitute the fragments. Poetic and surprising, Posthuma shows how even in the most intimate of connections, in another person lies the great unknown.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma. Translated from the Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey, Scribe, 2023

In short, poignant vignettes, What I’d Rather Not Think About is Jente Posthuma’s story of twin siblings: a brother who commits suicide, and a sister who is left behind. True to its title, the novel grapples with the narrator’s dark, complicated feelings of loss following the death of her brother, as she ruminates on the intensity of their relationship. In reflections of the siblings’ childhood and youthful dreams, tracing how these dreams changed or were lost on the way to maturity, Posthuma develops an affecting novel about grief by embracing its full complexity.

From its opening passage, Posthuma hints to the darker turn the twins’ story will take; the first memory shared is of the two experimenting with waterboarding as children, after seeing a film about Guantanamo Bay. To this, their mother sighs, accurately guessing that: “this has to be one of your brother’s ideas”. The untraditional game cleverly introduces their relationship, with the brother being more in control of their makeshift experiment, leaving the narrator coughing and spluttering from the experience. She asks her brother: “Why didn’t you help me?”, and only receives a single “sorry” in return. This pattern of behavior continues as adults, such as when the narrator joins her brother in a diving lesson, since “my brother expected me to follow him because that’s what I always did. If I wanted to go in a different direction, he would ignore me and keep walking.” READ MORE…

States of Alienation: Dana Shem-Ur and Yardenne Greenspan on Where I Am

July 19, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

That’s a major part of translation: to make sure that it’s still the original book.

Our June Book Club selection, Dana Shem-Ur’s Where I Am, is a novel that looks intensely at the dissonances of daily life in the aftermath of migrancy, profoundly reaching below the surface of superficial comfort to read the disassociations and discontents that stem from being not quite in-place. Reaching into the mind of an Israeli translator named Reut who has settled in France, Shem-Ur constructs a map of navigations amidst cultural codes, languages, and physical agitations, drawing out the anxiety of belonging. In this interview, we speak to Shem-Ur and translator Yardenne Greenspan about this novel’s simmering frustrations and the new Israeli diaspora, and how they have both used language to reflect the confounding boundaries of our social fabric.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Laurel Taylor (LT): Dana, I’d like to ask you about what sparked the creation of this novel—particularly as you’re already a translator and scholar. How did Where I Am come about?

Dana Shem-Ur (DS): I come from a family of a female authors. My mom is a poet, and my grandma wrote over thirty books, so I always was involved in this world. In fact, when I was little, I didn’t even read a lot. I just wrote fiction, and even published a small novella of one hundred pages when I was about twelve.

Then I dropped it because I was engaged in studying history, and I channeled my life of writing into other domains. It was only later on, when I was in Paris for three years for my master’s degree in philosophy, that I just came home one summer and wrote the first few pages.

I think what generated this novel was my certainty that I would remain in France, and I would have a life there. I began writing this story about a woman who is twenty years older than me and lives in Paris, but she’s unhappy, and I think part of it was just a reflection of my fears. What will become of me? Will I become Reut?

LT: It’s almost like speculative autofiction?

DS: Yeah. I didn’t even notice it when I wrote it, but it was also inspired by a lot of characters that I met. No character in Where I Am is a real person, but the salon of people at the Jean-Claude household are all inspired by people I met and by these talks and these Parisian intellects, who I always found very fascinating; they are my friends, but throughout the period I lived there, I felt there was a barrier between us. I was always the observer who was looking at this spectacle, not completely present, like Reut. I’m very fascinated by foreign cultures, so it felt like something I needed to write about. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: July 2023

July 10, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Catherine Xin Xin Yu and Heloisa Selles

New work from Natalia Ginzburg and Djuna!

This month, we’re excited to introduce two works that explore social intricacies from two respective angles: the familial and the technological. From the Italian, lauded modernist Natalian Ginzburg’s most recent English-language work plumbs into the combustive conflicts within a family unit to reveal the complex moralism within our most intimate relationships. From the Korean, science fiction author Djuna conjures a thrilling tale of how corporate politics and advancement colonises upon human identity. Read on to find out more!

ginzburg

The Road to the City by Natalia Ginzburg, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff, New Directions, 2023

Review by Catherine Xinxin Yu, Assistant Director of Outreach

Seventeen-year-old Delia is a frivolous beauty with neither talent nor sense. Her hobby is to get dolled up in her blue dress, take the dusty road to the city, and stroll around, admiring its affluence. Seeking to escape from the drabness of her townish family, she thought a bright future had beamed on her when a rich doctor’s son began pursuing her, but little did she know that it was an abyss, instead, that beckoned.

The Road to the City is Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg’s earliest published work, written in 1941 and published in 1942. At the time, she had been sent into internal exile to a village in Abruzzo for her husband’s anti-Fascist activities. Missing her home city of Turin while developing close ties to the locals in Abruzzo, she blended the places and people from memory and real life to craft this nuanced novella, with a snappy style that “[her] mother might like”.

Ginzburg has an incredible talent for depicting explosive clashes within families, integrating insight and humour into her narrative. English readers might already be familiar with her voice through Family Lexicon, her autobiographical novel published in 1963, and in The Road to the City, we see her burgeoning style with same pithy descriptions and wry comedy, surgically precise choice of scenes and voices, refrains of familial sayings as inside jokes and memory triggers, and nuanced character sketches that highlight their contradictions and moral ambiguity. But unlike Ginzburg’s own family, which is soldered with love and a common cause against fascism, The Road to the City traces how a family splinters into pieces from collective shame and spite.

READ MORE…