Topographies of Trauma, Loss, and Mourning in Natalia Ginzburg’s Early Works

This chapter draws on trauma studies and theories of spatiality to chart the topographies of trauma, loss, and mourning in Natalia Ginzburg’s five novellas collected in Cinque romanzi brevi (1964). The chapter first argues that Ginzburg’s essay “Portrait of a Friend” (1957) elaborates and maps an urban topography grounded in Turin’s melancholy nature and conflating cityscape and affective terrain, external reality and interior landscape. Ginzburg’s urban topographies can thus be read as “spatial stories” (de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, 1988, p. 115) or narrative maps (Tally, Spatiality. Routledge, 2013) of the characters’ inner lives, giving visible form to their otherwise unvoiced traumatic or “buried” experiences. Next, the chapter traces the narrative mappings of urban space in The Road to the City (1942), The Dry Heart (1947), Valentino (1951), Sagittarius (1957), and Voices in the Evening (1962). The city as plot and frame gives visible form to the interior lives of her marginalized female narrators, conferring to them a new centrality as the cartographers and storytellers of urban life. Furthermore, by situating these women in an unnamed urban landscape, Ginzburg grants their lived and mapped experiences a universal relevance.