“Scilla had this extraordinary power of filling her head with images, and my mother could remember so well how, before she had met Scilla, her life had been drab and empty.”

My introduction to Natalia Ginzburg was through her 1947 novel, The Dry Heart. A novel that I fell so head over heels in love that I immediately had to get hold of every book she has written. Since then, I have read only two more books, nervous to go through them too quickly and running out of any more Ginzburgs to read.

Sagittarius, published in 1957 and translated from the Italian by Avril Bardoni, is the third Ginzburg I have read, and I remain as much in love with her as ever.

The younger daughter of a domineering mother narrates the story of her mother’s ambition and ruin, leading ultimately to the irreversible fall of a family and everything she had so strongly desired to control.

Courting class

She presides over as a matriarch of a mismatched family comprising her older daughter, her poverty-afflicted son-in-law, an 11-year-old niece, a white poodle puppy, and a maid. The narrator refuses to live in the family home, and instead shares a flat with a friend and earns her living by editing for a magazine and giving private tuition. The mother, somewhat well-off, has a strong liking for money and class. While money has been parked away as rent from property and shares in the stock market, it is class that remains elusive to her.

Her daughters are less-than-impressive when it comes to finding suitable husbands. The younger cannot be made to look up from her books, while the elder, Guilia, though beautiful, leaves much to be desired intellectually. So when Guilia settles for a middle-aged doctor who is a “Communist, Jewish, and a stateless person,” the mother is beside herself with distress. Her previous declarations that “the Negroes and Jews” are our “brothers” appear ominous in retrospection – she had not expected these brotherly feelings to follow her into her home. She is hypocrisy at its best – espousing Christian beliefs while strongly disliking the “parish poor” and anyone of inadequate social standing.

Bored with life in a small town, she relocates the family to a modest house in the suburb of a city. Unwanted at her sisters’ china shop, she decides to borrow money and put it to a productive use – with rich and tasteful urban elites at hand, this could be the perfect opportunity to start a profitable enterprise.

Chatty and overfriendly, the city is not quite what she had imagined it to be. Guilia’s unprofitable marriage and her younger daughter’s aloofness leave her with little to do. Lonely yet high-spirited, she meets Priscilla Fontana – who insists on being called Scilla and introduces herself as a designer for a fashion house – during a maintenance session at the salon. Used to doing all the talking, she finds a worthy companion in Scilla, also equally enterprising and an energetic chatterbox.

The two decide to open an art gallery together, a space that they believe is essential to a culturally starved city. An expensive and ambitious project, she and Scilla scramble for funds in the midst of personal financial struggles, disregarding debts and promises. In her resolute pursuit of wealth and class, and desperate desire for a true friend, it becomes necessary to blind eye to the telltale signs of Schilla’s eccentricities.

She is determined to keep the plan a secret – perhaps to avoid suspicion and criticism from her family – and remains doggedly optimistic about Scilla. Scilla, on the other hand, claims friendship with wealthy, charitable families who have all apparently promised to help Scilla and her friend with the money they might require to establish a business.

Friends and benefits

Their friendship, as much founded on entrepreneurial ambitions, also has more traditional common grounds – both women are without husbands, are mothers to young women, and each wants their daughters to be successfully married. Scilla’s 18-year-old daughter Barbara evokes envy and desperation; the more the narrator’s mother sees her, the worse she feels about her own daughters who have neither the beauty nor the drive to find rich, upper-class husbands.

Observant by nature, she soon finds Scilla’s claims unconvincing. It does not escape her notice how Scilla weasels her way out of paying whenever they go out, stoutly relying on her friend to take care of any expenses. And yet, addled by the promises of future riches and the genuine desire to see the good in her friend, she is dazzled by optimism even as she keeps losing money and is never introduced to Scilla’s coterie of generous friends.

The climax – which the reader sniffs out halfway through the novel – is still a shocker when it finally comes. Ginzburg’s hypnotic writing keeps the reader hooked, fermenting a sadistic desire to see the narrator’s mother’s suffering stretch out eternally if it means staying with the novel a little longer. Ginzburg has an extraordinary talent for descriptions (sample this: “the youth had the face of a worn forty-year-old, like a rosy fruit pinched by the frost.”), and it is matched by translator Avril Bardoni’s talent who deftly keeps up with the capricious Scilla and her friend, as both keep up appearances in a bid to make money when financial opportunities were elusive to women.

The predictability of the plot does not prove to be a damper. If anything, Ginzburg elevates the trope with her clear-eyed scrutiny of human nature – especially the lies we tell and the lies we choose to believe. By letting the daughter tell the mother’s story, Ginzburg assumes the same position as the reader – aware of the mother’s humiliation but not a direct witness. The daughter’s voice allows for a dispassionate and objective storytelling, and we see the mother for who she is – stubborn, ambitious, but ultimately, a woman destroyed by resentment and her own foolishness.

Sagittarius, Natalia Ginzburg, translated from the Italian by Avril Bardoni, Daunt Books.

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