Like so many Italian writers of her generation, Natalia Ginzburg has found her most enduring inspiration in the fact of the Second World War, as well as in its causes and consequences. Mrs. Ginzburg, who was born in 1916, began writing in the early Thirties, and her first book, La strada che va in città, was published in 1942. Those Neo-Realist contemporaries with whom she is most to be compared are novelists like Italo Calvino and Vasco Pratolini, as well as Italian film directors like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica. Though NeoRealism was more of a trend or tendency than anything as clearly defined as a movement, the novels it included usually drew upon incidents from the war years, and they attempted to capture something of their native Italy in very human, but always direct and unprettified, form. Even the humor and distance that often mark Ginzburg’s style have their equivalents in De Sica films like Miracle in Milan, with its taste for broad characterization and earthy humor, and her novels share with Umberto D and The Bicycle Thief that limitless commiseration with all forms of victimization.

At one point in her collection of autobiographical sketches, Mai devi domandarmi, Natalia Ginzburg asserts that, “Anyone who writes runs two risks: the risk of being too kind and tolerant with oneself, and the risk of being too hard on oneself.” Though it must be stated from the beginning that Mrs. Ginzburg manages successfully to steer a