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Valentino
General Fiction瓦伦蒂诺
(italian) Natalia Ginzburg
An Italian national treasure literary master, the literary idol of a series of female writers such as Sally Rooney; a work about destruction in silence, examining class, wealth and marriage with a forensic gaze; she does not care about men, she just tells women's stories, a new model of female voices; if Ferrante is a friend, then Ginzberg is a mentor. This book contains three of Ginzburg's works, "Valentino", "Mother" and "Sagittarius". Valentino is handsome and studying medicine. In his father's dream, he will become the chief physician of the hospital in the future; in his mother's dream, he will marry a beautiful woman. Only his sister Caterina saw his true face: lazy, vain, spoiled by everyone. When Valentino gets engaged to the wealthy but ugly Maddalena without warning, his parents' dream begins to fall apart. As a person excluded from life, Caterina can only be an audience, waiting for the day when it is her turn to become the protagonist? So, she told us everything in a calm and specific sarcastic tone. In this novella published in 1957, we can see the writing art of Natalia Ginzburg: she is good at using a simple and colloquial narrative to weave together seemingly trivial events, thereby revealing the power and despair of life. The same technique also appears in the novella "Sagittarius" of the same year, and in the 1948 short story "Mother", which is full of dramatic tension. Between those trivial glitches, innocuous little quirks, trivial conversations and subtle actions, Ginzberg constructs pages of incomparably fresh, vivid and bright pages.
An Italian national treasure literary master, the literary idol of a series of female writers such as Sally Rooney; a work about destruction in silence, examining class, wealth and marriage with a forensic gaze; she does not care about men, she just tells women's stories, a new model of female voices; if Ferrante is a friend, then Ginzberg is a mentor. This book contains three of Ginzburg's works, "Valentino", "Mother" and "Sagittarius". Valentino is handsome and studying medicine. In his father's dream, he will become the chief physician of the hospital in the future; in his mother's dream, he will marry a beautiful woman. Only his sister Caterina saw his true face: lazy, vain, spoiled by everyone. When Valentino gets engaged to the wealthy but ugly Maddalena without warning, his parents' dream begins to fall apart. As a person excluded from life, Caterina can only be an audience, waiting for the day when it is her turn to become the protagonist? So, she told us everything in a calm and specific sarcastic tone. In this novella published in 1957, we can see the writing art of Natalia Ginzburg: she is good at using a simple and colloquial narrative to weave together seemingly trivial events, thereby revealing the power and despair of life. The same technique also appears in the novella "Sagittarius" of the same year, and in the 1948 short story "Mother", which is full of dramatic tension. Between those trivial glitches, innocuous little quirks, trivial conversations and subtle actions, Ginzberg constructs pages of incomparably fresh, vivid and bright pages.