Natalia Ginzburg: A Voice of the Twentieth Century ed. by A.M. Jeannet, G. Sanguinetti Katz (review)

350 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 meta-cinematic) with which to approach De Sica=s work. Each essay is duly presented by the editors, offering the reader a precise historical and critical context in which to situate the essay as well as incisive insights into the rationale for inclusion in the volume. The diverse essays are grouped by film treated and offer the reader a perspective through the decades, and often a contemporary rereading of De Sica=s classic films. As is to be expected, the bulk of the essays deals with De Sica=s neorealist films, his most celebrated contribution to Italian and world cinema, with notable contributions by Cannistraro, Landy, Kael, Bondanella, Kinder, and others, but due attention is also paid to his work in the 1960s and early 1970s with the essays by McIntyre, Marcus, and Westbeck. In the introduction, the editors aptly acknowledge the dearth of material on De Sica in English-language film criticism and lament the >gradual displacement of De Sica=s neorealist films from centrality to obscurity.= This, the editors note, is to be attributed to >a certain distrust >of emotion generated by a film and to the sentimental aspect of De Sica=s work. The sentimentality of De Sica films must be situated, they warn, in the climate of the postwar world, and De Sica=s eliciting of empathy must be seen in the context of his zeal to restore a cohesive community in a state he characterized as a >collective cauterization of emotion.= The introductory essay also effectively highlights the status of De Sica=s Ladri di biciclette as a film icon, citing allusions to De Sica=s film from Ettore Scola=s famous C=eravamo tanto amati (1974) to Robert Altman=s The Player (1992). Further, the editors aptly note that the whole tradition of postwar films about children >testifies to De Sica=s influence.= Extensive bibliographical information and a career overview of De Sica=s work as both actor and director, from the early neo-realist experience to the final films made in the early 1970s, are provided in this broad introduction by the editors who define De Sica >as much a reconstructor of reality as a discoverer of it.= While the volume lacks an extensive, comprehensive bibliography, which would have made a welcome appendix to this invaluable resource text, most essays (including the introduction) offer individual bibliographical references which will assist those desirous of further reading and research. This anthology will afford the avid Anglophone De Sica student or enthusiast the possibility of a greater depth of analysis than was previously available, and there is little doubt that the volume will be most welcomed by North American scholars B Italianists and film historians alike. (RACHELE LONGO LAVORATO) A.M. Jeannet and G. Sanguinetti Katz, editors. Natalia Ginzburg: A Voice of the Twentieth Century HUMANITIES 351 University of Toronto Press. xviii, 250. $50.00 Natalia Ginzburg is among the fortunate Italian writers who for decades have enjoyed and continued to receive wide reading audiences and interested attention from literary critics and translators. Despite this popularity around the fiction and the persona, there yet persists an aura of puzzled questioning, of suspended disbelief, in part because of her intellectual >accessibility= and the seeming contradictions displayed in her works. This collection, consisting of an introduction by Rebecca West, ten essays, an interview with Ginzburg as well as translations of some brief fiction, seeks to provide a fresh look at the writer, her novels, theatre, and critical writings. The essays embrace wide thematic fields and ranges of approach. Through her extended interview, which opens the monograph and her later analysis of the epistolary novels (>Writing the Self: The Epistolary Novels of Natalia Ginzburg=), Peg Boyers seeks to penetrate into the authenticity of the persona and the person for whom writing was the most truthful creative act of existence. As well, Luigi Fontanella=s essay pays a friendly homage to a writer whom he respected and admired especially in Voci della sera and Lessico famigliare, which Fontanella places among the >classics of the late twentieth century.= Fontanella is fascinated by the security of Ginzburg=s style, which deliberately employs a diversity of syntactic systems...