Chatty

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33253, 16 June 1973, Page 10

Chatty

Never Must You Ask Me. By

168 pp.

Natalia Ginzburg. Michael Joseph.

Natalia Ginzburg is a fairly wellknown Italian writer who attracted a good deal of attention about five years ago when a play of hers, “The Advertisement,” was done at the National Theatre with Joan Plowright in the main part. She has often been compared with Chekhov (in fact, her translator does it once again in her rather uninspiring introduction), but she herself claims to have learnt a lot from Pinter; in any case, she is at her best when she is writing naturalistically, in a fairly terse, chatty style. This new book is a collection of essays which might well have originated in a superior women’s magazine. Though about half of them have some bearing on the arts, their critical value is slight; their main interest, without question, is as rather unusual personal writing. This seems to come from Natalia Ginzberg’s peculiarly unassertive approach to her topics: even when she is handling a subject she knows well, she takes a rather directionless, low-key stance somewhat like the mood of Italian existentialist films—from her comments on Goldoni one could easily imagine that she had never before given a moment’s serious thought to the theatre.