The Dry Heart
Natalia Ginzburg
(Author)
Frances Frenaye
(Translator)
Description
The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: "I shot him between the eyes." As the tale--a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness--proceeds, the narrator's murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg's writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage. She transforms the unhappy tale of an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that seems to beg the question: why don't more wives kill their husbands?Product Details
Price
$12.95
$12.04
Publisher
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date
June 25, 2019
Pages
96
Dimensions
5.1 X 7.8 X 0.3 inches | 0.3 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780811228787
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About the Author
Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) was born Natalia Levi in Palermo, Sicily, the daughter of a Jewish biologist father and a Catholic mother. She grew up in Turin, in a household that was a salon for antifascist activists, intellectuals, and artists, and published her first short stories at the age of eighteen; she would go on to become one of the most important and widely taught writers in Italy, taking up the themes of oppression, family, and social change. In 1938, she married Leone Ginzburg, a prominent Turinese writer, activist, and editor. In 1940, the fascist government exiled the Ginzburgs and their three children to a remote village in Abruzzo. After the fall of Mussolini, Leone fled to Rome, where he was arrested by Nazi authorities and tortured to death. Natalia married Gabriele Baldini, an English professor, in 1950, and spent the next three decades in Rome, London, and Turin, writing dozens of novels, plays, and essays. Lessico famigliare (Family Lexicon) won her the prestigious Strega Prize in 1963 and La famiglia Manzoni was awarded the 1984 Bagutta Prize. From 1983 to 1987, she served in the Italian parliament as an Independent (having left the Communist Party), where she dedicated herself to reformist causes, including food prices and Palestinian rights.
Frances Frenaye (1908-1996) was an American translator of French and Italian literary works. She worked at the Italian Cultural Institute from 1963 to 1980 and was responsible for editing its newsletter. She won the Denyse Clairouin Memorial Award (1951) for her translation from French to English of Georges Blond's The Plunderers and J.H.R. Lenormand's Renee. She also wrote for an Italian newspaper, Il Mondo, for some time. Frenaye graduated from Bryn Mawr College and spent 50 years living in Manhattan before dying in Miami Beach.
Reviews
A flawlessly negotiated descent into the deep and dangerous chasm separating love's fantasies from life's realities.
Ginzburg never raises her voice, never strains for effect, never judges her creations. Though blessed with the rhythms and tensile strength of verse, her language is economical and spare, subordinate to the demands of the story. Like Chekhov, she knows how to stand back and let her characters expose their own lives, their frailties and strengths, their illusions and private griefs. The result is nearly translucent writing--writing so clear, so direct, so seemingly simple that it gives the reader the magical sense of apprehending the world for the first time.--Michiko Kakutani
I'm utterly entranced by Ginzburg's style--her mysterious directness, her salutary ability to lay things bare that never feels contrived or cold, only necessary, honest, clear.--Maggie Nelson
Unvarnished: Ginzburg, it's clear, is a master of the deceptively simple plot. To say that she's understated is itself a serious understatement. This slim, swift book was first published in Italy in 1947, but it feels chillingly modern. Haunting, spare, and utterly gorgeous, Ginzburg's novel is a classic.-- (04/28/2019)
Marriage, which had seemed an enchanting escape from her tedious, impoverished isolation--the "worn gloves and very little spending money," the "dingy boarding-house," the chilly schoolroom in which she taught Ovid--is in every way disappointing. (It probably doesn't help that the husband's mistress has told her she looks "like too much of a simple country girl" to murder anyone.) The prose is plain, direct but restrained, and much goes unsaid. Domestic life, its frustrations and miseries, occupies the foreground, the outside world barely discernible at the edges.-- (05/15/2019)
Her observations are swift and exact, usually irradiated by an unruly and often satirical humor. The instrument with which she writes is fine, wonderfully flexible and keen, and the quality of her attention is singular. The voice is pure and unmannered, both entrancing and alarming, elegantly streamlined by the authority of a powerful intelligence.-- (07/19/2019)
This book is a Roman candle -- quick and explosive.-- (07/19/2019)
Where does style come from? Is it knowingly constructed or unconsciously secreted? Invented or inherited? These questions dog me whenever I read Ginzburg, whose thumbprint is so unmistakable, so inscribed by her time, yet whose work stands so solidly that it requires no background information to appreciate.-- (07/19/2019)
What impels her forward is the voice: free, pellucid, almost always first-person, interested not in the long view but in the here and now.-- (08/06/2019)
Ginzburg modernizes the form...Between generational differences, genealogical secrets, former and secret lovers, and the desires and limitations related to real and aspirational social milieux, Ginzburg seems to suggest that in the sphere of the family there is always more to tell, and differently.
Ginzburg never raises her voice, never strains for effect, never judges her creations. Though blessed with the rhythms and tensile strength of verse, her language is economical and spare, subordinate to the demands of the story. Like Chekhov, she knows how to stand back and let her characters expose their own lives, their frailties and strengths, their illusions and private griefs. The result is nearly translucent writing--writing so clear, so direct, so seemingly simple that it gives the reader the magical sense of apprehending the world for the first time.--Michiko Kakutani
I'm utterly entranced by Ginzburg's style--her mysterious directness, her salutary ability to lay things bare that never feels contrived or cold, only necessary, honest, clear.--Maggie Nelson
Unvarnished: Ginzburg, it's clear, is a master of the deceptively simple plot. To say that she's understated is itself a serious understatement. This slim, swift book was first published in Italy in 1947, but it feels chillingly modern. Haunting, spare, and utterly gorgeous, Ginzburg's novel is a classic.-- (04/28/2019)
Marriage, which had seemed an enchanting escape from her tedious, impoverished isolation--the "worn gloves and very little spending money," the "dingy boarding-house," the chilly schoolroom in which she taught Ovid--is in every way disappointing. (It probably doesn't help that the husband's mistress has told her she looks "like too much of a simple country girl" to murder anyone.) The prose is plain, direct but restrained, and much goes unsaid. Domestic life, its frustrations and miseries, occupies the foreground, the outside world barely discernible at the edges.-- (05/15/2019)
Her observations are swift and exact, usually irradiated by an unruly and often satirical humor. The instrument with which she writes is fine, wonderfully flexible and keen, and the quality of her attention is singular. The voice is pure and unmannered, both entrancing and alarming, elegantly streamlined by the authority of a powerful intelligence.-- (07/19/2019)
This book is a Roman candle -- quick and explosive.-- (07/19/2019)
Where does style come from? Is it knowingly constructed or unconsciously secreted? Invented or inherited? These questions dog me whenever I read Ginzburg, whose thumbprint is so unmistakable, so inscribed by her time, yet whose work stands so solidly that it requires no background information to appreciate.-- (07/19/2019)
What impels her forward is the voice: free, pellucid, almost always first-person, interested not in the long view but in the here and now.-- (08/06/2019)
Ginzburg modernizes the form...Between generational differences, genealogical secrets, former and secret lovers, and the desires and limitations related to real and aspirational social milieux, Ginzburg seems to suggest that in the sphere of the family there is always more to tell, and differently.
