Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Once the experiece of evil has been endured it is never forgotten. Someone who has seen a house collapse knows only too clearly what frail things little vases of flowers and pictures and white walls are.

I've completely fallen in love with Ginzburg's writing: her prose is so simple and pellucid but that transparency holds depths. My only slight frustration with this book is that I wanted more - much more - I wanted these essays to continue.

This is a brief collection of short pieces, little more than a hundred pages in my edition. Not that the contents are slight: they distil much wisdom and hard-won life experience. Whether Ginzburg is contemplating exile from Mussolini's Rome, friendship, shoes or her vocation as a writer, these pieces have that rare ability to both connect with the reader and to also take on a resonance so much greater than their apparent subject.

Stand out pieces for me are 'The Little Virtues' where Ginzburg's politicised values are shown to shape her concept of life aimed at a younger generation ('the true defence against wealth is not a fear of wealth - of its fragility and of the vicious consequences that it can bring - the true defence against wealth is an indifference to money. There is no better way to teach a child this indifference than to give him [sic] money to spend when there is money - because then he will learn to part with it without worrying about it or regretting it'); and the beautiful melancholy of 'Winter in the Abruzzi', the place to where she, her first husband and children were exiled by the fascist government. Only at the end do we understand how this captures a time, unrecognised in the moment, of happiness.

For all of Ginzburg's tribulations and losses, one of the key emotions that comes through this book is her love of life, something which she, at least partly, attributes to having a vocation or purpose in life.

Wise, thoughtful, beautifully if unobtrusively written, I found this a fine companion to my recent reading of Ginzburg's Family Lexicon.