Daunt

For my second and final entry to this year’s Women in Translation month, I’ve read The Dry Heart (1947) by Natalia Ginzburg, translated from Italian by Frances Frenaye. I’ve read and loved a handful of the short Ginzburg books that Daunt are diligently republishing, so opened it up with high hopes – and immediately encountered this striking opening paragraph:

“Tell me the truth,” I said.

“What truth?” he echoed. He was making a rapid sketch in his notebook and now he showed me what is was: a long, long train with a big cloud of black smoke swirling over it and himself leaning out of a window to wave a hankerchief.

I shot him between the eyes.

Gosh! Well, if that doesn’t draw you in, then what will? Most of the novella is then told in flashback, with occasional returns to ‘present day’ and the aftermath of this shooting. It’s not my favourite structure for a novel usually, as I find putting the entire story in flashback often deadens it – but it worked well in The Dry Heart.

As so often, it wasn’t until writing this review that I realised that the narrator is unnamed. (Do others notice this while they’re reading? I never seem to.) She is an emotional, hopeful woman who becomes a little obsessed with an older man she sees at the theatre – a man we later learn is called Alberto. When he’s present, she can’t quite understand why she is so fixated on him: he isn’t especially attractive or charismatic, and seems rather diffident and unwilling to develop anything approaching an emotional connection. But when he isn’t there, the narrator can’t stop picturing their future life together.

Alberto doesn’t try to disguise that he is in love with another woman – but she is married. He has determined on singleness, since he can’t have her, but – with those cards on the table – is willing to propose.

When Alberto asked me to marry him I said yes. I asked him how he expected to live with me if he was in love with somebody else, and he said that if I loved him very much and was very brave we might make out very well together. Plenty of marriages are like that, he said, because it’s very unusual for both partners to love each other the same way. I wanted to know a lot more about his feelings for me, but I couldn’t talk to him for long about anything important because it bored him to try to get to the bottom of things and turn them over and over the way I did. When I began to speak of the woman he loved and to ask if he still went to see her, his eyes dimmed and his voice became tired and faraway and he said that she was a bad woman, that she had caused him a great deal of pain and he didn’t want to be reminded of her.

If you’re not familiar with Ginzburg’s writing, this is a good indication – she writes fairly plain prose, and uses it to crystallise emotions and emotional miscommunication in a simple way. It works very well, getting to the heart (pun not intended) of any scene with the directness of an arrow.

As the story progresses, we already know the ending – and we can guess how we might end up there (and learn pretty soon that, yes, Alberto is having an affair with the woman he’s in love with). But Ginzburg does a couple of more subtle things with this premise. One is the significance of the drawing, and the drawings that Alberto does as the story progresses – and the other is the scene in which the narrator and the woman Alberto loves meet each other. I think that’s the strongest moment in the story, overturning expectations.

Perhaps, also, it’s the scene I found most interesting because of the relationship between the two women: rivals, but both vulnerable, neither getting what they want from the situation or from their lives. And, as a complementary point, the reason I didn’t love The Dry Heart as much as the other Ginzburg novellas I’ve read is a matter of personal taste: I find stories of romantic couples much less interesting than the other sorts of relationships that Ginzburg has centred narratives around, particularly parent/child.

Perhaps that’s because narrative art of the past few centuries has been so obsessed with romantic love that it is refreshing to find somebody (especially somebody of Ginzburg’s talent) turn an equal attention to one of the many other fundamental relationships that make up our lives. So The Dry Heart is doubtless just as good as the other books I’ve read by her – but didn’t captivate me in quite the same way.

Happily, day two of A Book A Day in May was much more successful – and, somehow, even shorter. Only 62 pages! And yet Ginzburg gets a whole world into Valentino (1957), translated by Avril Bardoni. It contains a great deal, both in terms of character and plot, and yet doesn’t feel like it should have been any longer. It’s a miracle of concision.

The narrator is Caterina, writing with love and yet some detachment about her brother, Valentino. He is a young, selfish man who has been brought up to believe that he will become an exceptional man. He has been given an expensive education and most whims have been answered by his parents – even while Caterina and Clara, his sisters, have been expected to get by on scraps. Caterina sets off to a distant market early every morning, to get marginally cheaper vegetables, while Valentino takes exams in a half-hearted way and obsesses with his appearance. As the novel opens, Valentino is doing something he apparently does often: bringing a fiancée to meet the family:

Many times he had become engaged and then broken it off and my mother had had to clean the dining room specially and dress for the occasion. It had happened so often already that when he announced he was getting married within the month nobody believed him, and my mother cleaned the dining room wearily and put on the grey silk dress reserved for her pupils’ examinations at the Conservatory and for meeting Valentino’s prospective brides.

But Maddelena is different from the line of pretty young students that Valentino brings home. She is at least a decade older than Valentino, very wealthy, and not at all attractive. On meeting her, Valentino’s mother bursts into tears.

As the novella continues, this curious mix of characters go through months of their lives in not many lines. Ginzburg shows us Clara’s thawing resentment, Maddelena’s generosity and her subdued pride, Valentino’s much less subdued pride, the mother’s stubbornness, and the enchanting new character – a cousin of Maddelena who starts to charm Caterina. She is perhaps the only character we aren’t able to observe properly – because she is primarily the observer. The other characters are drawn with their competing emotions, while Caterina’s motives and feelings are a little less clear. She is a substitute for the reader and, being a daughter or sister to most of the characters, makes us feel fully immersed in the family dynamics.

Ginzburg is so good at families, at least in the two novellas I’ve read by her (the other being Sagittarius). And she is very funny too, with a wry humour that is exentuated by the sparseness of the prose. For example…

My father said he would go to have a talk with Valentino’s fiancée, but my mother was opposed to this, partly because my father had a weak heart and was supposed to avoid any excitement, partly because she thought his arguments would be completely ineffectual. My father never said anything sensible; perhaps what he meant to say was sensible enough, but he never managed to express what he meant, getting bogged down in empty words, digressions and childhood memories, stumbling and gesticulating. So at home he was never allowed to finish what he was saying because we were all too impatient, and he would hark back wistfully to his teaching days when he could talk as much as he wanted and nobody humiliated him.

The humour gradually ebbs from Valentino as the tone becomes more serious – and there is a development in the plot that is hardly given any space to grow, but works its way backwards through the story so that it transforms everything we’ve read.

Valentino is a brilliant little book, showing what a master of economy Ginzburg was. I’m keen to keep reading her, and glad to have at least one more book (Family Lexicon) on the shelves to try.