What is Natalia Ginzburg's The Little Virtues?

Many English readers meet Ginzburg through Family Lexicon, her memoir of a talkative Turin family. The Little Virtues came out from Einaudi a year earlier, in 1962, and it is the better door in if you only have an evening. You can read the whole thing in a couple of sittings, and you will probably reread one or two pieces the same week.

What is in it

According to the Italian Wikipedia entry, the book gathers eleven pieces written between 1944 and the early 1960s, most of them first printed in Italian magazines. They are occasional writings, collected later, and they fall into two halves.

The first half is mostly memoir and portraits. There is the winter she spent with her children and her first husband, Leone Ginzburg, in a village in the Abruzzo where he had been sent into internal exile. There is a piece about owning one pair of broken shoes in occupied Rome, and what it did to her sense of what matters. There is a portrait of Cesare Pavese, written years after his death. Two pieces look at England, where she lived with her second husband, the scholar Gabriele Baldini, in the early 1960s, one of them largely about English food, which she found rather sad. And there is a comic, tender portrait of her marriage to Baldini, the only piece in the book not previously published.

The second half is more reflective. Essays on her vocation as a writer, on silence and the difficulty of saying things to each other, on human relationships across a lifetime, on the generation that came out of fascism and the war. And finally the title essay.

The title essay, in brief

The title sounds like a recommendation. It is the opposite. Ginzburg argues that parents tend to teach children the small, useful virtues, such as thrift, caution, shrewdness, tact and the wish to get ahead, and that they should teach the large ones instead: generosity and indifference to money, courage, frankness and love of truth, love of other people, and the desire to be and to know rather than to succeed.

You don't need to be a parent for it to land. It reads as an argument about what kind of person you want to be, and about how much of ordinary life is organised around fear of losing out.

What it feels like to read

Ginzburg's sentences are short and unadorned. She doesn't decorate, she reports, and the emotion arrives sideways, often when you least expect it. The humour is dry and self-deprecating, especially in the marriage essay. The darkness is real: war, loss and her first husband's death sit underneath much of the book, though she rarely dwells on them directly.

In English, the translation by Dick Davis was published in the mid-1980s.

Who it suits

• Readers who love essays but are tired of essays that show off.
• Anyone heading to Turin, Rome or the Abruzzo who wants the twentieth century in human scale.
• Parents and teachers, for the title essay alone.
• People who think they don't read non-fiction: these pieces read like short stories.

If you want to know more about the form itself, our page on what a personal essay is is a good companion.