Valentino and Sagittarius

Description

Two novels about family life and fraudsters by one of the twentieth century's best Italian novelists. Valentino and Saggitarius are two of Natalia Ginzburg's most celebrated works, tales of love, hope, and delusion that are full of Ginzburg's characteristic mordant humor, keen psychological insight, and unflinching moral realism. Valentino is the spoiled child of doting parents, who have no doubt that their handsome young son will prove to be a man of consequence. Nothing that Valentino does--his nights out on the town, his failed or incomplete classes--suggests there is any ground for that confidence, and Valentino's two sisters, one of whom narrates the story, view their parents and brother with a mixture of bitterness, stoicism, and bemusement. Everything becomes that much more confused when, out of the blue, Valentino finds an enterprising, wealthy, and strikingly ugly wife, who undertakes not just to support him but the whole family. Years will pass and life will slip by before the cost of this arrangement to everyone involved becomes clear. Saggitarius is another story of misplaced confidence recounted by a wary daughter, whose mother, a grass widow with time on her hands, moves from the country to the suburbs, eager to find new friends and a new occupation. Brassy, bossy, and perpetually dissatisfied, especially when it comes to her children, she strikes up a friendship with the mysterious and talented Scilla, who paints and sews elegant dresses for her beautiful red-headed daughter and gossips about her rich friends. Soon the two women are planning to open an art gallery and boutique in the center of town, if they can work out the finances and find the right place. It turns out, however, that knowing better than everyone can hide a truly desperate naivete.

Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) was born in Sicily and raised in Turin, in a household that was a salon for antifascist activists, intellectuals, and artists. During World War II, Ginzburg and her husband edited an antifascist newspaper and after the war she wrote several novels, short stories, essays, and two plays, many of which have been translated into English. NYRB Classics published a new translation of her novel Family Lexicon in 2017. Avril Bardoni was a translator of Italian literature into English. She translated the work of Ricardo Orizio and Luciano De Crescenzo, among others. Cynthia Zarin is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Ada Poems and Orbit, as well five books for children and a collection of essays, An Enlarged Heart- A Personal History. She teaches at Yale and lives in New York City.

"[Ginzburg's] observations are swift and exact, usually irradiated by an unruly and often satirical humor. The instrument with which she writes is fine, wonderfully flexible and keen, and the quality of her attention is singular. The voice is. . . entrancing and alarming, elegantly streamlined by the authority of a powerful intelligence." -Deborah Eisenberg, The New York Review of Books "Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like." -Rachel Cusk, The Times Literary Supplement "A glowing light of modern Italian literature . . . Ginzburg's magic is the utter simplicity of her prose, suddenly illuminated by one word that makes a lightning stroke of a plain phrase . . . As direct and clean as if it were carved in stone, it yet speaks thoughts of the heart." -Kate Simon, The New York Times "The raw beauty of Ginzburg's prose compels our gaze. First we look inward, with the shock of recognition inspired by all great writing, and then, inevitably, out at the shared world she evokes with such uncompromising clarity." -Hilma Wolitzer "There is no one quite like Ginzburg for telling it like it is. Her unique, immediately recognizable voice is at once clear and shaded, artless and sly, able to speak of the deepest sorrows and smallest pleasures of everyday life." -Phillip Lopate