Todos os Nossos Ontens" é um livro belíssimo, em que as histórias de diferentes famílias se cruzam, ao longo de anos, tendo como pano de fundo a Itália de Mussolini e a Segunda Guerra Mundial. It was incredible how fear and danger never produced ignoble words but always true ones, words that were torn from your very heart. With her signature clear-eyed wit, Ginzburg asks how we can act with integrity when faced with catastrophe, and how we can love well. Yet in the early years the war is not yet all-consuming and they even go off for their usual summer vacations. man pasirodė per daug kasdienių kaimo reikalų, kurie nebuvo itin įdomūs ar kuom nors pažįstami, per daug pasikartojimo, per mažai kažkokio kitimo.

In Part Two, many of the characters who had a minor presence in the first part become central to the story, while the central figures in Part One get pushed to the periphery although never entirely forgotten. Hier schetst ze het wel en wee van een onorthodoxe italiaanse familie tijdens het facisme in italië en de daaropvolgende oorlog.A quem quer que nos apeguemos ao longo da narrativa, nunca estamos realmente preparados para os perder - na ficção como na realidade. Tenía además mucha curiosidad por leer a Ginzburg, a quien seguiré leyendo, porque tiene algo propio, y quiero saber si todos sus libros van en este tono o si cambia en otros.

Soon, Danilo is taken to prison, and Ippolito and Emanuele enlist Anna’s help to burn the newspapers and books they have been hiding behind the piano. Anna, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl in a small town in northern Italy, finds herself pregnant after a brief romance. It’s about two families in Italy, one family well off and one not so well off before World War II and during it. All Our Yesterdays was published seven years after the end of the war, and it is difficult not to hear Ginzburg’s own voice in this passage, sitting and grinding away at her desk, “without either danger or fear”, trying to make sense of what remains. And that was a good thing, because when fate announced itself with a loud fanfare of trumpets you always had to be a little on your guard.As readers, we come to see and feel the inextricable relations between the inner and outer worlds of human beings. Set against the backdrop of Italy between 1939 to 1944 - the months of anxiety before the country entered the war through to the tension following the Allied victory - "All Our Yesterdays" follows the lives of two families during the period of great turbulence.

All Our Yesterdays is among the great novels of its century, and Ginzburg among the great novelists. It’s the elder son Ippolito who bears the brunt of his father’s tyranny, forced to assist him with his writing and various other tasks. Yet it is unignorable – her sister’s boyfriend, Danilo, is jailed for spreading seditious literature – even when the effect is comic, such as villagers refusing to take fascists seriously because they know one of them as the local chemist’s son. In the post-war world, some form of emptiness also gnaws at these survivors, who otherwise used to rebellions, revolutions, and political turmoil, must navigate a welcome but substantially altered and unknown era of peace.This is certainly not an exhilarating piece of WWII fiction, nor is it a walk in the park, it was tough I admit, and you really have to get on board and put in the work. What’s more, as if the frightening global scale of war was not enough, the book’s characters, both major and minor, also have to contend with unexpected deaths, suicides, quarrels, boredom, anxiety, adultery, betrayals, and abandonment. It’s easy to recognise on an intellectual level that this must have been Ginzburg’s intent – to remind every reader that the twentieth-century fascist debacle would be felt long into the future; but there was something more personal about this novel, a familiarity in terms of character and incident that had me respond in an emotional way.