The Village Still Weighed by War : VOICES IN THE EVENING<i> by Natalia Ginzburg; translated by D.M. Low (Arcade Publishing/Little Brown: $16.95; 171 pp.) </i>

Long admired in her native Italy, Natalia Ginzburg’s terse, limpid novels and trenchant essays are now being reissued in English translation. Even in this one short novel, the author’s sensitivity to the nuances of Italian political and social issues and the economy with which she distills the essence of an entire region through the personalities of a few characters are immediately clear.

A member of the Italian Parliament as well as a dramatist, biographer, critic and translator, Ginzburg was born in Sicily, grew up in Turin and married the notable anti-Fascist Leone Ginzburg. During the war, the family fled to an isolated village in the mountains of the Abruzzi, where they lived in enforced obscurity until an ill-timed return to Rome, where Leone Ginzburg was arrested and killed by the Nazis. Widowed, the author returned to Turin, worked for a publishing house and began writing the stark, deceptively simple stories of a nation in post-war conflict and confusion.

“Voices in the Evening,” first published in 1961, is set in a small provincial village and narrated by Elsa, whom we see both as an innocent adolescent and as the disillusioned young woman she becomes. The style is austere, virtually minimalist, yet the salient incidents are so meticulously chosen that we know the people and the town as thoroughly as in a saga three times the length. In effect, the reader becomes the writer’s collaborator; filling in background, imagining detail, establishing connections merely suggested in the story itself.

Elsa’s mother is a querulous hypochondriac, disturbed at her daughter’s single state and fearful that she’ll wind up like her Aunt Ottavia, an elderly maiden lady who lives as a shadowy presence in her sister’s household. In Elsa’s view, Aunt Ottavia is treated almost as if she were inanimate, as unobtrusive and convenient as a spare armchair. When the novel begins, Elsa is 27, a dangerous age for Italian women of her time and place. Her prose is edgy, the flat, declarative mode revealing her cynicism.

The De Franciscis are the leading family of the village, owners of a once- prosperous factory that has fallen into decline though the neglect of the owner and the indifference of his sons. One of these sons, the brooding and mercurial Tommasino, is the love of Elsa’s life, a passion he reciprocates only wanly. Although Elsa becomes his mistress, spending Wednesday and Saturday afternoons with him in a rented room in a nearby town, the affair seems to lose momentum as it proceeds, paralleling the decline of the family factory. When Tommasino finally brings himself to propose formally, he’s so oppressed by the imminence of marriage that Elsa releases him; a fortunate decision, because Tommasino is so lacking in vitality that the marriage seems doomed to mirror the sinking family fortunes. Elsa deserves better, and one senses she’ll eventually find it.

The De Franciscis’ sons have been overshadowed since childhood by their cousin Purillo, an orphan adopted by their father “Old Balotta.” Purillo is an ambitious, energetic opportunist, and as Tommasino observes, he “has got plenty of vitality, or rather, he has not so much got it as that he behaves as if he had, and he gets the results he wants . . . Perhaps he has never realized that they have already exhausted all the vitality that was available in this place.”

Succinct as it is, the novel provides memorable vignettes of the various people whose lives are inextricably bound to the narrator’s--the ill-chosen wives of the De Franciscis brothers, the giddy Bottiglia sisters, continually held up to Elsa as an example of successful womanhood; the promising young man Nebbia, killed by the Fascists, whose death permanently touches all the young people in the town. Even the subsidiary characters, defined in a reference or two, contribute significantly to our perception of life in this particular place during an era of disruption and change.

Unfortunately, the grace of Ginzburg’s style in Italian is often obscured by an awkward, imprecise and quaintly British translation that seems ill-suited to an essentially contemporary novel. Raffaella, one of the two De Franciscis daughters, is described as a “boisterous hobbledehoy”; a servant returns from berry-picking “heated,” Elsa’s mother refers to an English raincoat as a “montgomery.” Even so, “Voices in the Evening” will arouse interest in a writer who explores the profound effect of historical upheaval upon Italian life; a theme she has made particularly her own, fully exploiting her political sophistication and her intimate knowledge of village life.