The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg

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.