Valentino and Sagittarius

Two novels about family life and fraudsters by one of the twentieth century's best Italian novelists.
Valentino and Saggitarius are two of Natalia Ginzburg's most celebrated works, tales of love, hope, and delusion that are full of Ginzburg's characteristic mordant humor, keen psychological insight, and unflinching moral realism. Valentino is the spoiled child of doting parents, who have no doubt that their handsome young son will prove to be a man of consequence. Nothing that Valentino does—his nights out on the town, his failed or incomplete classes—suggests there is any ground for that confidence, and Valentino's two sisters, one of whom narrates the story, view their parents and brother with a mixture of bitterness, stoicism, and bemusement. Everything becomes that much more confused when, out of the blue, Valentino finds an enterprising, wealthy, and strikingly ugly wife, who undertakes not just to support him but the whole family. Years...