The book comprises five novels (La strada che va in città, È stato così, Valentino, Sagittario, and Le voci della sera) and four short stories (Unʼassenza, Casa al mare, Mio marito, La madre).
Written over a thirty-year span, from 1933 to 1961, they mirror the author’s literary and existential evolution, from youth to full maturity.
As the writer herself remarks in the 1964 preface, one confronts a stylistic pursuit in which the effort “to no longer write by chance...
pretending to know,” led to the discovery

that I still ran the risk of being haphazard.
Because it was not a flaw of adolescence, but rather a flaw of my spirit..
I was adept at pretending to love what was in truth indifferent to me

.
Yet this 1964 note seems itself to be an artifice, for across all the writings in this collection there emerges such a mal de vivre, such an acute pessimism regarding the female condition, that it would be disquieting if these existential states were merely a simulation, a matter of “guesswork.”
And indeed, the collection also bears witness to a life's trajectory, from the awareness of unhappiness to indifference.
To consider solely the three principal novels: in the first (La strada che va in città, 1941), the protagonist is an adolescent girl living in the countryside alongside her siblings and her cousin Nini.
The city is a place to escape a monotonous life and discover love.
The girl is courted by Giulio, yet deep down she is in love with her cousin Nini.
Adolescence comes to an abrupt end when the protagonist discovers she is pregnant with Giulio’s child and, though aware she does not love him, agrees to marry him.
Yet she longs to return to the time before, when she could

run off to the city every day, and look for Nini and see if he was in love with me, and go to the pine grove with Giulio too, but without having to marry him.
Yet all of this was over and could never begin again

.
With that same passive resignation, she receives the news of Nini’s suicide, and over time “it became harder and harder to think of him.”
The second novel (È stato così, 1947) is the most unsettling.
It opens with the protagonist shooting her husband dead.
What follows is the account of how this murder came to pass.
A young schoolteacher meets Alberto, an older man, unhandsome but intriguing.

I wondered if he was in love with me and if I was in love with him, and I no longer understood anything.
He never spoke words of love to me, and I certainly never spoke to him of that either

.
Yet she marries him, only to discover that her husband has had a mistress for many years and frequently goes away with her for long periods.
The protagonist accepts this life

because I had never been capable of living and now it was certainly too late to learn

, but the death of the daughter born of the marriage and her husband’s cold reaction unleash a despair that had been repressed too many times.
She can no longer live with this man, nor will she ever know other men, and so “I shot him in the eyes.”
In her 1964 notes on this novel, dedicated to her husband, Ginzburg seems almost to downplay its dramatic impact, asserting that “the gunshot was born of chance”—it might just as well not have been there, even though it is precisely the murder that gives meaning to the tale.
Does the writer wish to disown a deep and intimate unhappiness by pretending to write by chance? And why, moreover, dedicate to her husband a piece of writing in which resentment and disillusionment resonate so powerfully? In the third novel (Le voci della sera, 1961), the narrative moves away, at least ostensibly, from the themes of grief and sorrow, sliding toward the dilemmas of indifference and incommunicability.
The protagonist chronicles the Balotta family saga and their gradual dissolution.
The various members of a once-vigorous lineage wearily pursue entrepreneurial schemes that never materialize and contract drab, unhappy marriages.
The protagonist, too, conducts a relationship with one of the scions, but in secret, like clandestine lovers.
When they decide to come out into the open to marry, they stop speaking to and seeking out one another, because

everything has been spoiled...
because we have begun to bury our thoughts, deep down, deep down inside us.
Then, when we start talking again, we will say only useless things...
it means being unhappy, but making sure not to say so to each other, in order to live

.
Nothing remains but incommunicability, aptly conveyed by the senseless dialogues—full of banal, trivial matters—of the protagonist’s mother, with which the novel concludes.

From her earliest work, Ginzburg’s writing is spare, essential, and incisive, and thus strikingly innovative compared to the bombastic, redundant style of the early twentieth century.
As one advances through the collection, certain attempts to make the narrative more airy and descriptive become apparent, but the author inevitably returns to concision: her sentences are no longer, however, “a whip-crack and a slap,” as in La strada che va in città, but turn into tightly wound dialogues with a distinct theatricality, almost Pirandellian.
It is as though the author had attempted an opening, only to withdraw once more into a world where only vacuous communication is possible.

Natalia Ginzburg’s narrative overpowers, invading with its “absolute, inexorable, and mortal awareness” of an inescapable unhappiness, of a life that must have endured a profound sorrow, well concealed beneath an intellectually and socially brilliant existence.
It is an affliction marked by a deeply feminine character.
The female protagonists, who are always the first-person narrators, are plain and ordinary; they cross paths with shallow, selfish men, and their very motherhood is experienced as an obligation, an accident, which often comes to an ill-fated end.
The female condition appears as a prison and a foreordained fate within a petty-bourgeois milieu.

Why read it? These are literary works of great beauty, bearing witness to a feminine dimension of grief.

Five Novellas