LUCE 330 | Page 27

Ritratto di / Portrait of
Natalia Ginzburg
© Fondazione 1563 per l'Arte
e la Cultura, Compagnia
di San Paolo
Natalia Ginzburg’s
Voices – and lights –
in the Evening
A
t the beginning of her novel Voices in the
Evening (published by Giulio Einaudi
editore in 1961, and re-published in 2015 in a
new edition by Domenico Scarpa), Natalia
Ginzburg writes: “It was October, beginning to
get cold; in the village behind us the first
street lamps had been lit, and the blue globe
of the Hotel Concordia illuminated the deserted
square with a vitreous light.” She thus touches
the topic of light in the landscape. Her way of
writing, as noted by Italo Calvino, always used
simple elementary sentences that were,
however, able to include a relation with the
outside world made of affection, amazement,
and irony.
The landscape that is dear to Natalia is that of
the Piedmont region: “in the distance, in the
evening one could distinguish the lights of
Castello, and the scattered ones of Castel
Piccolo, high upon the shoulder of the hill;
and beyond the hill – says the author –, is the
town”. One of the protagonists of the story
visits the city right up to “the last bus, at ten
o'clock in the evening”; the city is coveted and
evoked at sunset, when in the town where Elsa
lives the lamps are lit.
Natalia Ginzburg is fascinated by light.
However, in her story centred around
dialogues, light enters the scene indirectly,
only in the dialogues, always at the same hour,
always in the evening, therefore assuming an
atemporal significance. “In the evenings, they
were alone, she and Mario, in the great
drawing-room, crowded with dark pictures,
valuable china, and mirrors. A few candles in
silver candelabra were lit, and there was no
other light”. Madame Cecilia commented that
“with those candles, at least they save on the
electric light.” But “that was not true, they
also paid enormous bills of electric light.”
The stories, the many stories that Natalia tells,
appear and reappear in the evening twilight
that absorbs all the big and small events. “The
next day, in the evening, Tommasino came to
speak to my father.” After some days, “he
started to come every evening,” and when the
engagement is broken, Elsa asks Tommasino,
“Is this what you were thinking about while
we were in the sitting room in the evening,
with Aunt Ottavia? You were turning your back
on your own soul?” Just like Tommasino, also
Elsa hid her identity in the evening; they
buried their thoughts, as Italo Calvino specifies
in his introduction to the mirror-story of the
disenchanted and uniform vision of Natalia
Ginzburg’s existence, where no one loves
anyone anymore.
In a rigorous and unscrupulous manner,
Natalia Ginzburg uses the word “evening” in
the dialogues without mentioning the lights.
But in her short novel, the elegiac tone yields
to the feelings of love in such an evanescent
way that they disappear as soon as Natalia
brings them to light, in the evening.
11 – To be continued. For
“Epiphanies of light”, to date, the
following short stories by Empio
Malara have been published in
LUCE: “Alessandro Manzoni, a
creator of light” (n.317,
September 2016); “Herman
Melville. Light that invites us on a
journey” (n.321, September 2017);
“Light and dark in the portrait of
James Joyce as a young man”
(n.322, December 2017); “Flashes
and lights in Hemingway’s A
Farewell to Arms” (n.323, March
2018); “The artificial sun in the
novel The magic mountain by
Thomas Mann” (n.324, June
2018); “The irreverent and
irrational light in some texts by
Carlo Emilio Gadda” (n.325,
September 2018). “Philip Roth’s
revealing lights in American
Pastoral” (n.326, December
2018); “Marcel Proust’s lighted
windows in the novel Swann’s
Way” (n.327, March 2019); "In the
Light of Leonardo da Vinci"
(n.328, June 2019);
"Fyodor Dostoevsky's dark
underground as illuminated
by Alberto Moravia" (n.329,
September 2019)
EPIPHANIES OF LIGHT / LUCE 330
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