[...] as readers, we have the chance to see a few of these people, under unimaginable pressure, with chaos and violence everywhere around them, responding with transcendent and unforgettable moral beauty. These are not people born with special moral qualities, people who find it easy to be brave and honorable. We know them: we know quite well that they are just as irritable and selfish and lazy as we are. As Anna's husband tells her: 'no one found himself with courage ready-made, you had to acquire courage little by little, it was a long story and it went on almost all your life.' Ginzburg shows us the possibility of this courage, she bears witness to the possibility, and reading her work we know and believe also.

[...] Its stakes are as high as the most cataclysmic crisis of the twentieth century, and as low as the marriage of one young woman, the fate of one family dog. As readers of this novel, we come to see and feel the inextricable relations between the inner and outer worlds of human beings. Ginzburg's novels manage not only to accommodate, but to place into a meaningful relationship, the intimate lives of fictional characters and the radical social and political changes unfolding around them. [...]