A review by readingrinbow
All Our Yesterdays by Natalia Ginzburg

challenging emotional reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Despite a very spare prose style, Ginzburg’s characters are very real and she writes about the experience of living through war so acutely. Reading her biography, I can’t help but think how much of what she put on page was deeply personal, even through the guise of fiction. I couldn’t put this down and despite myself felt drawn to characters both main and peripheral as they struggled to make sense of their lives and push forward with the growing uncertainty and anxieties of war. Ginzburg displays that very human impulse to comfort and self delude so well here and with little judgment.

By the end of the story, the end of the war presents the weary survivors with the chance to remake the world and they look to it with bittersweet bewilderment. Their courage certainly had been acquired little by little, hard won and tested in the fire of inhuman acts of war.