Valentino

This is the second novella I’ve read from Daunt Books gorgeous reprints of Natalia Ginzburg and I’ve decided they make perfect travelling books. Neat enough to fit comfortably in a bag they’re intense hits of story that are easy enough to finish on anything but the shortest of journeys and yet leave you feeling completely satisfied!

‘I lived with my father, mother and brother in a small rented apartment in the middle of town. Life was not easy and finding the rent money was always a problem.’

So begins Caterina’s account of living with her handsome, vain and utterly self absorbed brother Valentino. A serial fiancé, what he most enjoys is dressing up, admiring himself and playing with the kitten, oblivious of the never ending expenses his parents face, trying to fund his medical studies. He’s a man who has never shown any signs of ambition and yet his parents are sure that he’s destined to become ‘a man of consequence’.

But one day Valentino arrives with a new fiancée and instead of a young girl in a jaunty beret Maddalena is at least ten years older than him, very wealthy and spectacularly ugly. The family are stunned, the parents hopes for their perfect son gone with one single moustachioed, cigarette smoking djinn.

But Maddalena turns out to be the perfect daughter and sister in law, generous with her time and money she invites Caterina to move in with them and with Maddalena’s cousin Kit often in their home too, the setting is in place for a story that challenges our prejudices and upends societal norms.

Told in Ginzburg’s direct, economical style the story of Valentino is often as funny as it is infuriating and ultimately devastating. Written in 1957, sexuality is never openly discussed but conventional gendered roles are questioned by the story that isn’t written, the one that’s lurking behind Caterina’s mundane narrative until it finally comes to the fore with a shock.