"Where it shines is at the line level, where Ginzburg and Proctor together often strike perfect notes." -- Bradley Babendir - Chicago Review of Books
"Happiness, As Such is a tragicomedy of manners about an Italian family whose only son flees the country after being persecuted for his political activism. Published in Italy in 1973, its primarily a series of letters between the estranged son and his friends and family back home. If that sounds uneventful, rest assured its just as compelling as The Dry Heart." -- Chicago Tribune
"The web of connections between private and public life, between the intellectual and the emotional and the political, is delicately visible, only occasionally breaking the surface." -- Lidija Haas - Harpers
"A deliciously arid novel." -- Interview Magazine
"A swiftly moving blend of dialogue and letters, the novel speaks to Ginzburg's remarkablerange as a writer: beneath the currents of humor and wit is a subtle work of insight and feeling. Another masterpiece from one of the finest postwar Italian writers." -- Kirkus (starred)
"Ginzburg writes with humor and pathos. Epistolary, family exposes each to the other and we soon recognize that happiness is defined as mundane visitations, daily routines, and reactivated memory of joy as seen through loss." -- Lucy Kogler - Lit Hub
"Ginzburg modernizes the form...Between generational differences, genealogical secrets, former and secret lovers, and the desires and limitations related to real and aspirational social milieux, Ginzburg seems to suggest that in the sphere of the family there is always more to tell, and differently." -- Los Angeles Review of Books
"The voice is instantly, almost violently recognizable aloof, amused and melancholy. The metaphors are sparse and ordinary; the language plain, but every word load-bearing. Short sentences detonate into scenes of shocking cruelty. Even in middling translations, it is a style that cannot be subsumed; Natalia Ginzburg can only sound like herself." -- Parul Sehgal - New York Times
"Magnificent...This is a riveting story about how even when a family drifts apart, the bonds of blood relations supercede the deepest disagreements." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Ginzburg is a unique voice and theres a direct simplicity to her prose that makes her dry observations all the more riveting" -- Hephzibah Anderson - The Guardian
"Candor and lies, love and exasperation, farce and inconsolable grief are seamlessly compounded in this very funny and deeply melancholy book. After devastating loss, which is to be feared more greatlythat nothing will ever be the same, or that many things will be more or less the same? Life goes on, all too recognizably. You can get used to anything when theres nothing else left, says one of the characters toward the end." -- Deborah Eisenberg - The New York Review of Books
"A wonderful act of virtuosity." -- Joan Acocella - The New Yorker
"Happiness, as Such, translated by Minna Zallman Proctor, is from 1973, by which point Ginzburg had mastered her method and was complementing the sharp, glittering edifice of her prose with buried seams of humor and pathos." -- Sam Sacks - The Wall Street Journal
"Natalia Ginzburg is a fierce writer. She trusts in thingsin the few objects that can capture the emptiness of the universe." -- Italo Calvino
"The voice of the Italian novelist and essayist Natalia Ginzburg comes to us with absolute clarity amid the veils of time and language. Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like. This voice emerges from her preoccupations and themes, whose specificity and universality she considers with a gravitas and authority that seem both familiar and entirely original." -- Rachel Cusk
"Her sentences have great precision and clarity, and I learn a lot when I read her." -- Zadie Smith
