Day 4

“She had a baby girl and her mother died. She separated from her husband who killed himself a short time afterwards.”
Death is always a swift occurrence in Ginzburg’s narrative. There is no drama, the ripples are barely visible on the surface...

The swiftness of death in Ginzburg's work: of her husband tortured to death by the Nazis, she wrote simply this: “During the German occupation Leone had died in the German Wing of the Regina Coeli prison in Rome, one icy February.” (Family Lexicon)

Lucrezia’s meat-loaf is becoming another refrain in the letters. “Her meat-loaves fall apart.” More things in heaven and earth fall apart than Lucrezia’s meat-loaves!