PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksFamily is the masterpiece. Borghesia, the companion piece, is a fine work, but it is overshadowed by the longer one that precedes it ... in both these novellas...it’s one damn thing after another, a chronicle of interwoven lives. But Famiglia has the more sophisticated shape ... The series of downhill events in Family feels inevitable and irresistible ... Ginzburg, like Tolstoy, vaults beyond the moral and psychological parameters she has set up—not to a vision of spiritual redemption, though, but to something far more primal and rooted ... Borghesia, like Family, is rich in character and event, mingling comic blunders with grievous error, and also ends with the protagonist’s death in middle age ... So why doesn’t this story have the emotional richness of Family? Unlike Carmine, a tangled, tormented character, Ilaria’s emotional life is hollow: that is the essence of her tale, the reason why a friend suggests she get a cat. But her hollowness can’t carry the weight of the narrative as Carmine’s complexity does. The surrounding characters, while never dull, do not work their way into the heart. Compared to Family, Borghesia seems something Ginzburg might have tossed off as a companion piece. Even the humor is broader and lighter than in Family ... Like all of her work, these two novellas...are suffused with the rigorous wisdom Ginzburg earned through calamity and her determination to persist nonetheless in her work.
Stevie Smith
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksWhat might appear as frivolity is actually Smith’s extraordinary gift for wordplay and her delight in linguistic acrobatics of every sort. Beneath that surface is a harsh, dark vision, which verges on tragedy, and a romantic obsession with death, the most frequent theme — and character — in her poems ... Nonetheless the poems are everywhere brimming with life and wit, and delight the ear with their changeable rhythms, their juxtaposition of high and low diction, their odd characters and often sinister fables ... Happily, the gems in this volume far outweigh the lesser poems. It has the added advantage of laying bare their author, who was known to be secretive.
Joyce Carol Oates
RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksThe memoir offers something more durable and estimable than facile intimacy: the unmistakable ring of truth, achieved through rigorous thought and beautifully articulated.
