ALL OUR YESTERDAYS by Natalia Ginzburg

Note: I am not a paid reviewer, and I have purchased this title to read for my personal enjoyment.

An epic family saga set in Italy before and during WW2 that features teenagers and young adults of two families who live in a nameless northern Italian city. The prose seems to come from a middle adolescent’s point of view, with long, run-on sentences and repetition, often presenting observations of an impossible adult world, be it parents, romance, future prospects or political threats. The writing style is narrative reporting, with almost no dialogue: Mammina brought him up by “slapping his face” because “slaps are good for strengthening the facial muscles.” The young people are mostly socialist sympathizers, and Italian malaise against the war is captured throughout the story, for instance Guistine explains he joined up, not because he’s fascist, but because he wanted to know “what sort of thing war was” and learned that it was “just firing, neither for nor against anybody, just firing with your feet like pieces of ice in your boots, and with your eyes dazzled by the snow.” The first part of the book gives us great depth on the motivations, fears, and limitations of main characters Ippolito, Anna and Emmanuelle, and later family friend Cenzo Rena takes center stage. I came to understand the effectiveness of the prose’s simple elegance in contrasting daily family tensions with major life moments (e.g., pregnancy out of wedlock, suicide, war bombing). Cenzo Rena is a larger than life, heroic figure whose paternalistic soul butts him up against the Nazis in a moving, climactic, atrocity scene.