DISCOVERIES

A PLACE TO LIVE : And Other Selected Essays of Natalia Ginzburg, Edited and translated from the Italian, by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Seven Stories: 240 pp., $24

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Natalia Ginzburg grew up in Italy in the 1920s and ‘30s. She was the daughter of nonobservant Jews, living at a time of fascism, internment and war. Lynne Sharon Schwartz has deftly organized the essays in “A Place to Live,” beginning with “Human Relations” and ending with “Fantasy Life,” so that the reader gradually comes to know Ginzburg and is prepared to read the rest of her fine work. “Human Relations” shows how childhood bewilderment at the rage and mysterious behavior of adults becomes shame and “stone-eyed” denial. Parenthood brings suffering, followed by exhaustion, followed by stone-eyed children and ends in compassion. All of the essays are infused with Ginzburg’s signature melancholy, the sadness of her generation, a “people who will never feel at ease,” a people that understands “the fragility of vases of flowers, paintings and white walls.”

“We have no more tears,” she writes. “What moved our parents has no power to move us.” In the essay “My Craft,” she writes in awe that writing feeds on what is terrible and also what is wonderful in us. She warns that writing cannot console but admits that it has, at times, saved her.

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SHOPPERS: Two Plays, by Denis Johnson, HarperCollins: 224 pp., $12.95 paper

Here we are again, wiggling under the absurd scrutiny of an authoritatively inflated government, and literature is rising to the occasion, using its first battalion: satire. And Denis Johnson, one of our finest satirists, is waxing dangerous. On the surface, his timing and humor and his ability to mix contemporary life with universal conundrums are well established from “Jesus’ Son” to “Already Dead” to “The Name of the World.” But underneath his fine writing is the ghost of George Orwell, howling and weeping through humor at the self-importance we arrogate to ourselves, the things we are distracted by and the sugarcoated palliatives we suck on in place of religion.

In “Shoppers,” Johnson sets two plays in the margins of the West: Houston, Texas, and Ukiah, Calif. “Hellhound on My Trail” takes on bureaucracy in America. Marigold is a young woman employed by the Department of Agriculture in a jam factory. She is interrogated in a waiting room by a female agent working for the Food and Drug Administration for “allegedly” asking a co-worker to cover certain parts of her anatomy with jam and lick them off. It’s Kafka and Camus but with Johnson’s own sick 21st century twist. The second play, “Shoppers Carried by Escalators Into the Flames,” pokes fun at our lack of spirituality. It takes place in a lower-middle-income apartment in Ukiah. A grandmother offers sarcastic wisdom for her son and grandson. The ever-present TV is a character in the play, announcing early on that shopping malls are burning across the country. When one of the characters tries to quiet it by slapping it, the TV shouts, “Violence? You wanna threaten me with violence? I am the everlasting God of violence, pal.” The play heats up in a kind of religious hysteria, with Grandma at one point exclaiming: “I have not felt the touch of the sacred in my heart since we crossed that line into California .... I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to go, I’ve got ....” “The president has called for calm,” the TV intones. “He met this afternoon in the Oval Office with advisors from.... “

Look for the plays off-Broadway this summer. And when Johnson says it’s time to leave the country, a few of us are gonna start packing.

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LETTERS TO A YOUNG NOVELIST, By Mario Vargas Llosa, Translated from the Spanish, by Natasha Wimmer, Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 136 pp., $17

When novelist Mario Vargas Llosa was 14, he would write to authors he admired, such as “Faulkner, Hemingway, Malraux, Dos Passos, Camus, Sartre,” all of whom were alive at the time. The source of literary inspiration, he learned, is rebellion. By imagining lives and inventing futures, a writer imagines a different world. Writing, he warns, requires utter devotion and servitude. Vargas Llosa spends much of “Letters to a Young Novelist” describing the cosmology of the novel, which rests on the four pillars of narrator, space, time and level of reality. He uses examples from Melville, Cervantes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges and others.

“Letters to a Young Novelist” has less heart than its namesake “Letter to a Young Poet,” by Rainer Maria Rilke. It is made of sterner stuff, perhaps, in the end, better-suited for a middle-aged novelist who has already tried and maybe failed and is willing and ready to try again. Let the young ones dream a bit longer.