The Dry Heart

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A frighteningly lucid feminist horror story about marriage. The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: “I shot him between the eyes.” No one can love you. Do you know why? Because you have no courage. You’re a little man who hasn’t enough courage to get to the bottom of anything. You’re a cork bobbing on the surface, that’s what you are. You don’t love anybody and nobody loves you.” Natalia Ginzburg is the last woman left on earth. The rest are all men—even the female forms that can be seen moving about belong, ultimately, to this man’s world. A world where men make the decisions, the choices, take action. Ginzburg, or rather the disillusioned heroines who stand in for her, is alone, on the outside. There are generations and generations of women who have done nothing but wait and obey; wait to be loved, to get married, to become mothers, to be betrayed. So it is for her heroines.

I have turned this question over and over in my mind since reading Natalia Ginzburg’s The Dry Heart, a grim, anti-Romantic novella about marriage and betrayal. It opens with a bang. Italy, for the somewhat fantastical image that foreigners have of it — cultivated largely by Fellini, ancient monuments, and Italian food — produces some of the world's best cold-blooded literature. I'm thinking of the novels of Alberto Moravia, whose "Contempt" feels like a kind of companion piece to "The Dry Heart" and Elena Ferrante, whose "Neapolitan Quartet" owes a great debt to Ginzburg.But rewarded with what? Not love, and not desire—not exactly. Before they get married, the thought of sleeping with Alberto fills her with “terror and disgust.” He is old, short, ratty, and, predictably, bad in bed. When they make love, she consoles herself with the “tender, feverish words” he whispers in the dark. But she soon discovers that Alberto’s repertoire is limited. Repeating the same words too many times drains them of their meaning, their capacity to delight and intrigue. The cork resurfaces twice, first when Alberto tells the narrator that he still loves Giovanna: “He said she was often unkind to him and his life was entirely without joy. He felt stupid and useless, like a cork bobbing on the water.” The second time, it is as a metaphor and accusation delivered by the narrator: “You’re a cork bobbing on the surface, that’s what you are.” The original simile suddenly, startlingly, loses its depth. Alberto is exposed as a hollow, passive, discardable thing. The choice of the novella offers a cool, impatient response to novel-length performances of male indecision, self-absorption, and sentimentality. Natalia Ginzburg believes in things, those scarce items that can be ripped from the vacuum of the universe: the mustache, some buttons. She believes in her feelings, in her actions, whether kind or desperate. Four years before she shoots her husband and walks to a café for a coffee, a lonely young woman living in a boarding house meets an older man called Alberto. They go for long walks along the river and on the outskirts of the city; they look like lovers, although they’re not.

The absence is strange, for the author had not had a comfortable time during the war, being known to have left-wing tendencies, and to be Jewish. Her first husband was tortured for his activities against the Fascist regime resulting in his death in 1944. They had three children. The heart can't pump enough blood to meet the needs of body tissues. The body diverts blood away from less vital organs, particularly muscles in the limbs, and sends it to the heart and brain. On September 21, 1947, Italo Calvino—then the twenty-four-year-old book critic for Piemonte’s L’Unitá newspaper—published a review of Natalia Ginzburg’s second novel, The Dry Heart . The review, which is presented below in English for the first time, opens with this proposal: “Natalia Ginzburg is the last woman left on earth. The rest are all men—even the female forms that can be seen moving about belong, ultimately, to this man’s world.” For a moment, if you’re familiar with Calvino’s surreal masterpiece Invisible Cities , written twenty-five years later, you feel as if you’re teetering on the edge of one of that book’s bewildering scenes—all glimpse and symbol, hallucination posing as anthropology. But no, the young writer is merely trying to find the perfect words to describe the entirely singular aesthetic of a novelist who is vexingly (to him, it would seem) female. Calvino’s review stands in the Ginzburg archives as one of the most bizarre, yet also astute, as he pinpoints the way her made-up worlds are hyperrealistic voids, her characters both humane and remote, her Minimalism dependent on small mundane artifacts, her domesticity suffocating and vast. “It’s a shame we’ll never know Ginzburg’s reaction to this review,” the Ginzburg biographer Sandra Petrignani writes, “that positioned her in a new world of fiction, modern precisely because it is ancient.” natalia ginzburg’un şimdiye kadar okuduğum en farklı romanı ki ilk romanlarından olduğu için böyle sanırım. hiçbir biçimde politik değil, ginzburg politik bir yazar ve bu okuduğum diğer kitaplarına bolca yansıyordu. There’s Caroline, who, if she were any more Claire from Fleabag, would be moving to Finland for the sake of her cold, cold heart. She works in a fracture clinic and thinks anyone gluten free who isn’t a diagnosed coeliac is “just an arsehole”. The children’s parents are the real scene stealers, as is so often the case: Bernie (Pom Boyd) is usually found drinking, unravelling and spying on her neighbour, whom she’s convinced has murdered his wife. And Tom, played by the magnificently sad-faced Ciarán Hinds, is “riding” his acupuncturist and falling apart in his own inscrutable way. Every character, no matter how peripheral, feels fleshed out.

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These reissued 1940s novellas by Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg delve into the complexity of female desire. At the start of The Dry Heart , the narrator says of her husband, “I shot him between the eyes” – and what follows is a portrait of their devastatingly unhappy marriage. In The Road to the City, a teenager dreams of escaping poverty through marriage to a wealthy man. In sparse, economical prose, Ginzburg portrays the emotional and social limits placed on women, and the ultimately unsuccessful attempts to escape them. The Lost Café Schindler Ginzburg writes in the first person, on behalf of characters who are profoundly remote. Hers is not the first-person of lyrical diary keeping, but rather an externalization in which she participates body and soul. Deep down, however, she is still the same bored and lonely woman who never seems to find, or even bother to seek, meaning in her life. The proletarian girl from her first book, The Road to the City, who doesn’t know how to protect herself from emotions, whether her own or those of others, is refashioned in Ginzburg’s second novel, The Dry Heart. Here is a middle-class teacher, at first lonely and waiting to find a husband, then trapped in the disappointment of a bad marriage. The restless need for redemption that appears in the first novel as a longing for the city destined to fade, incarnates now as murder, a gesture of ultimate desperation. But I'm now at that point where, while a temporary break from social obligations was initially much welcomed, I've started to somewhat miss interacting with people. Nice people, mind you, not the type who don't even bother to wave when they walk past where I'm sitting on the patio or whatever. I mean, how hard is it just to wave? It's not like your odds of contracting something go up by making such a casual gesture, is it? Eu pensava como cada um de nós se esforça sempre por adivinhar o que fazem os outros e como cada um de nós se atormenta constantemente imaginando a verdade e se movimenta como um cego no seu mundo escuro tacteando ao acaso as paredes e os objectos.”