From The Paris Review, Italo Calvino's review of Natalia Ginzburg's The Dry Heart, her second novel:
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.
Ginzburg comes an outsider to a world in which only the most conventional signs, tracing from an ancient era, can be deciphered. From emptiness there emerges, here and there, an identifiable object, a familiar object: buttons, or a pipe. Human beings exist only according to schematic representations of the concrete: hair, mustache, glasses. You can say the same about the emotions and behaviors; they reveal nothing. She doesn’t reveal so much as identify already-established words or situations: Ah ha, I must be in love … This feeling must be jealousy … Or, now, like in The Dry Heart, I will take this gun and kill him.
And yet Natalia Ginzburg is a strong woman. By which I mean a strong woman writer. The burden of which hangs, like a condemnation, over her books. And yet her acquiescence to such a burden does not make her language earnest, sentimental, or evasive. There is no womanly capitulation to the flurry of sensations or intermittent tricks of memory you find in Virginia Woolf, then imitated by other women writers, even Italian women writers.
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.
Whosoever has said that, because of the raw nakedness of Ginzburg’s language, she is influenced by the Americans, is being simplistic. The prose lineage she belongs to is that of open eyes, all scene, one where human connection is tacit. It is a great lineage, one that links Maupassant to Chekhov, and Chekhov to Mansfield. But young Katherine Mansfield knew how to play with sadness as well as boredom. Natalia Ginzburg doesn’t play; she surprises, she dreams. Moreover, as interwoven as they are with echoes of place, her novels invite association with the great women writers of Italian realism, Grazia Deledda, Caterina Percoto.
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.
That is how it ends, but the ending comes at the beginning. The novel opens with the crime: “And I shot him between the eyes.” After which the heroine sits on a park bench and recounts how she got to such a point and then turns herself in. To tell the story here would deprive you of the flavor, the stern clarity that drives the story right through, unfaltering, to the end—that’s the reason that you have to read it all in one sitting.
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