Reviews - All Our Yesterdays by Natalia Ginzburg

Came to this book to find My Brilliant Friend vibes and succeeded. I love the ordinary day details and all the village characters in Italian novels!! Was very interesting hearing about WWII from an Italian perspective also. Only downfall was that I didn’t feel I got enough insight into Anna and would have appreciated some character development for her.

ninarose's review against another edition

2.5

another review on here said “it isn’t bad it just isn’t ferrante”. And that really encapsulates how I felt. Which feels unfair but unfortunately my brain went “this is like that other Italian writer set around 40s/50s Italy about how the domestic drama spills into and contorts with politics”. I tried to push past that about a quarter of the way into the book so I could be more fair but I found myself getting bored (itchy bored like let’s focus on anything else bored) and it took me a while to read because of it. I’m all for sparse writing but there was no impact. Rooney’s introduction / my coworkers praise and other 5-star-reviews on here all talk about how attached you get to the characters and how gut punching it is but I just did not get that at all. The prose was so detached and ambivalent toward any action or drama that everything felt so painstakingly flat. EVEN when talking about facism and acts of violence it was just so unconcerned. This could just not be my kind of style but I struggle to understand the praise even on a clinical level.