In the early years of the fascist era Natalia Ginzburg, the daughter of a Jewish university professor, lived in Turin in an intellectual and eccentrically bourgeois with socialist tendencies. This milieu, which in retrospect seems exactly suited to her needs and talents, she regarded as totally unpromising for a writer. She read chiefly Chekhov and other foreign authors, intent not so much on style or theme as on the power of fiction to create modes of reality different from her own: invisible protectors and interlocutors . . . whose books I didn't read, but rather sucked as a baby sucks the nurse's milk, trying to absorb and penetrate the secret of the prose. This secret was involved most of all with the creating of a poetic ambience, and the ambience was Petersburg, the Nevsky Prospekt, the nebulous and oblique mysteries of the Russian soul. Conscious of her own total deficiency in these matters, she began in absolute humility to write fiction, ex pecting nothing of herself and dumbfounded with pride and astonishment when she managed after some years of effort to finish her first story. In this way, setting one word after another in the only way it seemed possible for her to set words one after the other, in three decades of work she produced a full-scale novel and five short ones, a number of stories, the family autobiography Lessico famili?re, a volume of essays, and a quantity of sketches and miscellaneous pieces. These thirty years were beset by the most anguishing kind of personal tragedy: her was dispersed by the war, the first husband Leone Ginzburg murdered by the Nazis, her close friend Pavese took his own life. Yet her writing, as inti mately personal as it is, never touches on these things or mentions them only in passing, and it never loses its good humor in spite of the omnipresent vein of melancholy. She is a tragic humorist, as Kafka has been described as a religious humorist.