This past week, I read Valentino and Sagittarius by Natalia Ginzburg, a writer I’ve read before and count among my favorites. These are two of her early novellas, published in 1951 and 1957.
Ginzburg has a way of getting into the heart of everyday life, its small rewards and stubborn obstacles. Her prose is plain and spare. In both novellas, the narrator uses a flat register - either resigned to her own circumstances (Caterina in Valentino), or detached enough to tell the tale from a remove (the daughter in Sagittarius who makes it a point to stay far away from her mother). Any emotion you feel is therefore your own as you read.
Valentino’s parents are convinced that he will become “a man of consequence”, pouring their meagre resources into his education, and sidelining their two daughters, Caterina (the narrator) and Clara her older sister, in the process. When Valentino shows little academic prowess and marries a rich and domineering older woman, his parents’ heartbreak is complete.
In Sagittarius, the narrator's mother, recently widowed, moves to the city, determined to start a new life. She has grand plans - she will open an art gallery, and have lofty conversations on art and culture with the city’s intellectuals. After many months, none of this comes to pass, she has made no friends, and life remains as monotonous as ever. And then one day, she happens to meet Scilla Fontana, a woman of some mystery who nonetheless appears to have access to the rich and cultured that the mother craves. Soon they are caught up in each other lives and ambitions and naturally, things do not go as planned.
You do feel sympathy for these characters - Valentino’s parents who are hopelessly deluded in their ambitions for him; Valentino himself, who cuts a sorry figure, always well short of what others want of him; and Caterina whose passivity is a bit unnerving, you sense that her capacity to dream has been methodically eliminated, not by any overt cruelty by others but just by life as it unfolds for her. Then there is the self-deception and vulnerability of the mother in Sagittarius; she is, like Valentino, somewhat pathetic and deserving of our sympathy despite her delusional endeavors.
These are stories with no grand outcomes or personal transformations, people remain who they are, and life does not get easier. It feels very real and you cannot look away.