«Quel vizio che avevo di guardare sempre fisso dentro di me». On Natalia Ginzburg’s “È stato così” [pp. 67-82]

Abstract

This essay re-examines Natalia Ginzburg’s È stato così (1947), starting from its critical reception, which has emphasised the novel’s objectivity within a Neorealist framework. Through a close reading of the narrative voice, the temporality, and weak forms of causality, the article argues that the suppression of rhetorical and emotional emphasis cannot be reduced to an adherence to the realist paradigm. Instead, the novel emerges as a narrative form situated at the intersection of realist issues and modernist devices, thereby challenging traditional historiographical categories and inviting a reading of XX century fiction not in terms of rigid periodizations, but as a field of continuities, reuses, and transformations.