The great memoirist and story writer Tobias Wolff once complained about the “essentially anonymous” gestures used in fiction and drama to delineate characters: “the mixing of drinks, the crossing of rooms, the lighting of cigarettes”. The problem, he said, was that these details “don’t tell us that much. What you want is a gesture that tells you something particular.”
Natalia Ginzburg seems to me to be a master of the gesture that tells you something particular. In her 1952 novel All Our Yesterdays, the latest welcome reissue of her work by Daunt Books, there are many, many characters, but each is drawn with beautiful particularity. The father of one of the two central families is writing his memoirs, titled Nothing But the Truth, which “contained fiery attacks on the fascists and the king. The old man used to laugh and rub his hands together at the thought that the king and Mussolini knew nothing about it, while in a small town in Italy there was a man writing fiery remarks about them.” Everyone gets this loving treatment: even a local dog is “curly haired and stupid”.
