Day 2

Quintessential Ginzburg, stories told slantingly: Lucrezia narrates her life—births, deaths, affairs, breakups—dryly in a letter to Giuseppe. From Albina’s letter we learn that Lucrezia locks herself in her room to write him, not taking care of her children’s meal.

“I fall in love easily… Perhaps waiting so anxiously made me fall in love with him… He was just very kind and I fell in love with him.”
It takes a special kind of talent not only to fall in love easily but to articulate the illogic of falling in love.

There are letters by post, hand-delivered letters, letters brought over by intermediaries (and read by them), and letters unsent yet described in letters—Albina’s torn-up love letters to Giuseppe, for instance. This is one of the most epistolary novels.