The plots of Valentino and Sagittarius are crowded with auspicious and doomed marriages, unexpected deaths, and sudden betrayals. Ranging from the absurdly comic to the miserably tragic, these events sometimes appear melodramatic. In Valentino, the twenty-six-year-old Caterina recounts how her father believes her brother Valentino will become “a man of consequence.” The rest of the family suffers various privations to support the lazy, indifferent, and self-absorbed medical student in the hope that they will be rewarded once he is an important doctor. Caterina is without marriage prospects and studying in a teacher’s college while her sister, Clara, struggles to get by on an inadequate income with three children, one of whom is constantly unwell. The novella is set into motion when Valentino suddenly announces that he will marry Maddalena, who is described as short, fat, and “ugly as sin” but possesses significant wealth. The family is scandalized by Valentino’s decision, and his mother reproves him for marrying “just for money” but he persists in marrying Maddalena, who promises to reform Valentino so that he becomes more assiduous in his studies and begins to support the family with a monthly income. Despite the seemingly exaggerated or obvious nature of these events, one fully believes in them because a fatalism hangs over all these proceedings as the novellas disabuse their characters of their delusions.
Sagittarius is also narrated by a woman in her early twenties, but she focuses her attention on the story of her domineering mother, who moves into the city from a provincial town. Unlike the straightforward first person perspective used in Valentino, in Sagittarius Ginzburg pushes the narrator into the background as she portrays the many unfortunate incidents that befall her mother. This distance between mother and narrator allows the latter to observe the irony in a number of situations involving her mother and creates a tone that makes the novella into something of a morality tale. The mother, who seeks urbanity in her new setting, quickly grows bored with the unrefined city people she meets and dissatisfied with the cold marriage between her other daughter, Giulia, and a poor country doctor. Her dissatisfaction dissipates when she finally meets Scilla, a boastful dressmaker who stirs her fantasy of opening her own art gallery.
The driving force of both novellas is the unexpected appearance of an outsider who is seemingly of a superior class and who not only disrupts an unsatisfactory status quo at home but also offers a member of the family—Valentino in the first novella, the narrator’s mother in the second—the possibility of realizing unrealistic hopes. This outsider is surrounded by an air of mystery that obscures their reasons for ingratiating themselves with the family, giving the reader the uneasy impression, as articulated by the narrator of Sagittarius, of “vaguely sensing something suspicious beneath the surface” but being “unable to define or clarify the feeling.” In a sense, the novellas, and especially Sagittarius, resemble mystery novels because one must guess at the motive of an enigmatic character that is slowly and subtly revealed.
Ginzburg’s method of illuminating character is similar to Chekhov’s, for she chooses a single yet vivid feature and frequently affixes it to the character until it becomes an essential quality embodied by that character alone. In Sagittarius, Giulia, the narrator’s sister, always appears with a “vague, sweet, melancholy smile” that suggests both her vacuity and buried sadness. Then there is Scilla with her “poor yellow bob” and “shabby fawn wool coat,” a manifestation of her self-pity, gaudiness, and penchant for exaggeration. Similarly, Gilberto, Scilla’s ex-husband, wears a worthless amethyst ring that indicates his deceitfulness and debauchery. But these defining characteristics can also often take the form of a spoken phrase repeated by a character to members of their family. (Using this sort of family argot as a commentary on the text is also a feature of Ginzburg’s most well-known novel, Family Lexicon.) In Sagittarius, the mother assures her daughter that she “had enough and to spare for the parish poor.” Although these phrases are highly suggestive of character—the mother in Sagittarius is generous but careless with her money—they also become humorously ironic because their observations are completely betrayed by the events in both novellas. By the end of Sagittarius, for instance, the narrator’s mother cannot spare anything for the poor.
For Valentino in the eponymous novella as well as for the mother in Sagittarius, elevation in social class is signified by acquiring not only wealth but also culture and refinement. When Valentino is questioned about his decision to marry Maddalena, he responds that his fiancé “was intelligent, extremely intelligent and very cultured. He was bored with all those pretty little girls with nothing to talk about, while with Maddalena he could talk about books and a hundred other things. He wasn’t marrying her for her money; he was no pig.” Similarly, in Sagittarius, the mother dreams of Giulia’s engagement to an “extremely wealthy Tuscan industrialist of noble descent,” whom she immediately dismisses when he indicates his boorishness. After moving to the city, she also wonders, “where were all the cultured people, the intellectuals, the writers and painters, those to whom [she] was planning to offer cups of tea in her gallery?” For both, wealth alone cannot assure one’s social ascent: the prerequisite of culture must be satisfied as well (although in the case of Valentino posturing might suffice). And for both, marriage is the primary means by which one can rise in social class since it changes one’s social circle.
As in the works of Jane Austen, in Ginzburg’s novellas we encounter an emphasis on not only marrying but marrying well. But here coming up in society and marrying upwards are dreams entirely at odds with reality: Valentino’s marriage collapses; Giulia marries the doctor who she admires for his learning and refinement but who her mother claims is neither “handsome nor rich”; and Caterina’s plans for marrying Kit, a wealthy but idle cousin of Maddalena, quickly dissolve when Kit calls off the marriage after realizing he had woven “a beautiful fantasy but all made up with no basis in reality.” There is a brutal circularity as Valentino, Caterina, and the mother in Sagittarius all dally with wealth and high society, which then jilts and betrays them, ultimately leaving them where they began or even worse off.
In these novellas, most of the characters are steadfastly attached to their fantasies even when all evidence suggests their implausibility. Maddalena, like Valentino’s parents, believes her husband will reform himself, pass his exams, and become a useful doctor and husband. From the start, such reformation is highly unlikely because Valentino gives no indication of being anything but a layabout. Similarly, the mother in Sagittarius believes Scilla is a woman of learning and culture who can help her start an art gallery. However, there are signs that repeatedly contradict the mother’s notions about Scilla’s refinement: she keeps company with an idle ex-husband, has not a single novel but only children’s books to lend, and lives in a dingy apartment in a dreary area. Maddalena and the mother in Sagittarius therefore share not only a disgust with reality but also a faith that the life they feel they deserve will in fact arrive. Entranced by images of the future, they remain deluded by the present because they refuse to see what is so apparent to others.
Ginzburg’s two novellas recall James’s The Beast in the Jungle, another work about fantasies, misplaced hopes, and delusion. In James’s novella, John Marcher believes he is destined for a cataclysmic event or great affair that will completely alter his life, and he is reacquainted with an old friend, the generous May Bartram, who promises to accompany him until that great affair arrives. But as Marcher waits and waits Bartram dies, and he realizes only later that loving Bartram would have been the life-changing event. He had lost his chance because of his own ignorance and egotism. Valentino and Sagittarius are similar in that they depict interminable waiting. These works of quiet devastation are concerned with characters awaiting the great events—whether a marriage into nobility or the encounter with a cultured friend—that will change their lives. Eventually, for the characters in James’s novella as well as for those in Ginzburg’s, the great event occurs in the form of a fatal realization that they have missed their opportunities and now cannot escape reality. The narrator’s mother in Sagittarius “bid farewell to this life, a life she had never managed to love.” Both she and Maddalena are so in love with their dreams that they have never loved their lives.
