About this Event
The Short and Satisfying Book Club is led by Georgia Court. It is for those looking for a shorter read that is ripe for discussion. January’s selection is the magnificently stark and intimate novella, The Road to the City by Natalia Ginzburg, translated from Italian by Gini Alhadeff.
We will meet in person at our store location at The Mark, 117 S. Pineapple Ave. The book club is $19 which includes a copy of The Road to the City to be picked up at Bookstore1 any time before our meeting.
About the book:
A magnificently stark book—within the smallness of one poor, muddled, provincial life, Natalia Ginzburg finds enormous pain and loss
An almost unbearably intimate novella, The Road to the City concentrates on a young woman barely awake to life, who fumbles through her days: she is fickle yet kind, greedy yet abashed, stupidly ambitious yet loving too—she is a mass of confusion. She’s in a bleak space, lit with the hard clarity of a Pasolini film. Her family is no help: her father is largely absent; her mother is miserable; her sister’s unhappily promiscuous; her brothers are in a separate masculine world. Only her cousin Nini seems to see her. She falls into disgrace and then “marries up,” but without any joy, blind to what was beautiful right before her own eyes. The Road to the City was Ginzburg’s very first work, originally published under a pseudonym. “I think it might be her best book,” her translator Gini Alhadeff remarked: “And apparently she thought so, too, at the end of her life, when assembling a complete anthology of her work for Mondadori.
Natalia Ginzburg (1916–1991), “who authored twelve books and two plays; who, because of anti-Semitic laws, sometimes couldn’t publish under her own name; who raised five children and lost her husband to Fascist torture; who was elected to the Italian parliament as an independent in her late sixties—this woman does not take her present conditions as a given. She asks us to fight back against them, to be brave and resolute. She instructs us to ask for better, for ourselves and for our children” (Belle Boggs, The New Yorker).
Gini Alhadeff, translator, won the 2018 Florio Prize for her translation of Fleur Jaeggy’s I am the Brother of **.
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All signed up and unable to go? Please let us know! Seating is limited and there may be people on our waitlist who would like to take your place. Please send an email to [email protected] ASAP and hopefully we'll see you next time.
Clickto go to the Bookstore1Sarasota website.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Bookstore1Sarasota, 117 S. Pineapple Ave., Sarasota, United States
USD 20.33
