All Our Yesterdays

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Pressburger doesn’t make us want Braun to succeed exactly, but he expertly ramps up the tension so we simply must find out which deserved outcome lies ahead, as Braun gets closer to escaping Europe and justice and simultaneously learns more about how close they are to catching him. By the war’s end, Natalia was in her late twenties, a widow with three young children and a debut novella under her belt. Yet in the early years the war is not yet all-consuming and they even go off for their usual summer vacations. If Braun seems to have no regret about the horrors he enacted, he is at least traumatised by the deaths of his wife and child, who were killed in Operation Gomorrah, the allied bombing of Hamburg in July 1943.

Siempre que leo algo relacionado con la guerra me resulta incomprensible, y a la vez, quiero leer más. The adolescent Anna is mystified by these developments: are Emanuele and Danilo both in love with her sister? Guima, unsurprisingly, turns out to be a coward with no inclination of assuming any responsibility and Anna is in despair. To this day I can’t be sure when or how they died – he refused to discuss it, just as he refused to take part in any form of remembrance ceremony.Ginzburg is particularly adept at highlighting how everyday life appears meaningless and futile in the face of war, especially when external factors feel uncertain and threatening.

But while Emanuele remains relatively calm in the face of events, Ippolito is deeply unsettled, pacing his room at night and avoiding contact with others.

It really gives a sense of how it must have felt to be on the fringes of war, the tension and uncertainty as the conflict edges ever closer. The author is one of my favorite Italian authors and this is the first one of hers I am adding to my favorites bookshelf. I was astonished that I had never encountered Ginzburg’s work before: that no one, knowing me, had ever told me about her books. 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. A daughter who is secretly pregnant (but unmarried) dreams (almost hopes) that she and her unborn baby will be killed by the Germans.

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. The book focuses on two Italian families living opposite one another in a small Northern Italian town, with the story opening in the late 1930s during the run-up to war. With Mussolini in power and fascism on the rise, Ippolito becomes increasingly interested in politics, debating the issues of the day with Emanuele – the eldest son from the wealthy family opposite – and their principled friend, Danilo, one of Concettina’s many fiancés. We are introduced to our protagonist Anna whose father, an ageing widower, is moody, temperamental, and a staunch anti-Fascist engrossed in composing his memoir most notably his harsh views on Fascism.

Los tiempos son difíciles: el período en que el nazismo avanzaba sobre el continente bajo la indiferencia de Italia (y de Anna, aunque no de varios de sus allegados), el período en que la guerra se trasladó a Italia, y en la última etapa, la postguerra.