The Dry Heart

"Yes. I haven’t read a ton by Ginzburg, but my mother—who is teaching herself Italian in retirement—keeps raving about her, keeps calling me up to read me sentences in Italian from Natalia Ginzburg’s memoirs. Ginzburg is from an intensely literary family; her son is the historian Carlo Ginzburg, author of The Cheese and the Worms . I think Merve really puts her finger on what’s amazing about The Dry Heart : it’s a novella that helps you understand why a certain kind of emotionally intense reckoning, especially from the position of female disempowerment, might fit better into a novella format than a novel. The Dry Heart is short, focused, cyclical and repetitive. It’s the story of a woman who, you learn in the first paragraph of the novella, has killed her husband because she cannot take him any more. It circles around the moment when she shoots him, and backs into it from a number of different ways. Merve, in her essay, circles around the question: When should a woman kill her husband? And, when I interviewed her for a podcast, she said, ‘well, of course, it all arose out of my own impulse: doesn’t everyone want to kill them?’ Merve also makes the point that if it was from the husband, Alberto’s, point of view, it would be five volumes long and called Alberto’s Way. But because it’s the wife’s story, not the husband’s, it’s just so sharp, and incisive, and sits inside this little space. She really puts her finger on the way that Ginzburg can just sit in an emotional state and follow it. You might compare her to, like, Rilke or Andre Breton’s Nadja , these novels that are really are in someone’s mind. You’re there for so long, you can’t figure out what’s in the mind, and what’s the world being described. Except the thing that makes this novella is that, you know, she really did kill her husband. That’s the punctum that tears through and holds you. The logical comparison might be Elena Ferrante , but of course Ferrante chooses the path of maximalism, while all of Ginzburg’s books are pretty short. Yes, I think it’s two things: they are memorable, but it’s also easier for a short book to slip in and out of people’s attention. With big books, they either thud down or they stick around. Little books… people can be tremendously impressed by them, but … I don’t know. Maybe it’s the difference between a good lunch and a good dinner. They have a contained arc. Yes, I’ve actually read a bit—a series of essays, actually. Merve was raving about them. Family Lexicon . Based on what I’ve read, she’s incredibly good at capturing the essence of sensibility in a kind of impersonal way. Even in those essays, which are meant to be personal essays, there’s not a lot of revealing personal detail. It’s more like she resonates with place, the family setting. I would compare it to Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis . I don’t know if you’ve read the Ferrara novels—but it’s a Jewish family in Ferrara just before the war, and Garden (the novel and then the Vosconit film too) is incredibly good at rendering the feel of that space and time, just before everything is about to change: history is about to wipe this whole world off the map. But the novel doesn’t admit that this is happening until the very end. I feel like Ginzburg and Bassani share a sensibility: there’s an inner life, and then beyond that there’s the larger historical waves moving through that inner life. But it doesn’t mean that the inner life doesn’t have its own internal logic as well."