Sagittarius by Natalia Ginzburg #ABookADayInMay No.28

After a few days of feeling a bit lukewarm, or worse, about the books I’ve been reading, it was great today to read a really brilliant little novella. Sagittarius (1957) is my first Natalia Ginzburg, though I do have Family Lexicon on my shelves – and I also have Valentino, because Daunt Books have just republished Sagittarius and Valentino and sent me copies. Thank you!

This novella, translated by Avril Bardoni, is only 122 pages but manages to get so much into that short space. Here’s how it opens:

My mother had bought a house in the suburbs of the city. It was a modest house on two floors, surrounded by a soggy, unkempt garden. Beyond the garden there was a cabbage patch, and beyond the cabbage patch a railway line. It was October when she moved, and the garden lay beneath a carpet of wet leaves.

The house had narrow wrought-iron balconies and a short flight of steps down to the garden. There were four rooms downstairs and six upstairs, and my mother had furnished them with the few belongings that she had brought with her from Dronero: the high iron bedsteads, shaky and rattly, with coverlets of heavy flowered silk; the little stuffed chairs with muslin frills; the piano; the tiger skin; a marble hand resting on a cushion.

Like a curiously high number of narrators of my Books in May, this one is unnamed – as is, as far as I can tell, her mother. The narrator’s sister does get a name – Giulia – and much of the first half of this story is about the dynamics between the three women in their new home. The mother is domineering, determined, and relentless in her disparagement of her daughters – while simultaneously trying to praise them to others, and secure them husbands. The narrator is resentful and equally determined herself, though more often in what she refuses to be than what she actually does. Indeed, she is quite a passive character – an obstacle, rather than a catalyst.

In not many words, Ginzburg manages to show a complex, detailed, and wholly believable family group. Her little moments of seering observation are brilliant, and tell us so much about a person – for instance, the narrator comments on her mother that ‘when things were going badly for someone else, she always felt a little thrill of pleasure disguised behind an urgent desire for action’. There is love but little affection between the female characters.

The mother is ambitious for herself, as well as her daughters’ marriages, though in this case it is an ambition paired with inertia. She speaks a lot about her big plans for her future – opening an art gallery, say – but does little but talk. She relies on financial help from relatives, including her sisters who run a shop which she, the mother, believes she could run much more efficiently – though her brief stint there is unsuccessful.

Into their lives comes Signora Fontana and her curious coterie of hangers-on. She has connections to the great and the good (and, importantly, the rich) and Signora Fontana and the mother quickly encourage each other into an excitable friendship.

When we went back to the sitting room, my mother and Signora Fontana were already on first name terms. They had certainly had a good talk ranging over a multitude of subjects and had decided that the art gallery as projected by my mother should become a joint venture for the two of them; and it was going to be wonderful and exciting, a true intellectual centre in a city which had, up to now, catered so inadequately for the arts. They were sitting together on the divan like old friends, with an ashtray brimful of cigarette butts and mandarin peel beside them. Menelao was sitting on my mother’s knee, and as soon as we appeared she said that cats were better than dogs and Giulia’s puppy had tried her patience to the limit. Seeing the three of us enter together, Signora Fontana cried that she simply had to do a group portrait of us. My mother, agreeing, said that I should have to be decently dressed, however: she couldn’t bear that dreadful jumper, it made me look like a Russian factory worker.

As the novella continues, Signora Fontana and the mother are forever going for coffee together and making plans, but all the rich friends are busy all the time and the art gallery – or shop, named Sagittarius, hence the title – remains a discussion topic rather than an actuality. The reader has to wait and see whether dreams will become reality, or if there are reasons why it keeps being put off into the distance.

The plot is entirely unpredictable, but what elevates Sagittarius is Ginzburg’s clear-eyed understanding of human relationships. And particularly the lies we tell, and the lies we choose to believe. It all comes from the daughter’s perspective, and she is an interesting and well-constructed mixture of dispassionate and occasionally frustrated. Her passivity means we can go several pages where she seems objective, and then a flare up of resentment or confusion or pathos will remind us that we are reading a very personal view of the situation.

Sagittarius has made me keen to get to more Ginzburg. I was reminded of Stefan Zweig’s brilliant ability to sum up entire relationship dynamics through a crucial, feverish short period. And I thought of Sybille Bedford’s excellence at mother/daughter relationships. Both great authors to be reminded of, while being also very much her own writer.