The voice is instantly, almost violently recognizable — aloof, amused and melancholy. The metaphors are sparse and ordinary; the language plain, but every word load-bearing. Short sentences detonate into scenes of shocking cruelty. Even in middling translations, it is a style that cannot be subsumed; Natalia Ginzburg can only sound like herself ... translated with mirrorlike polish by Frances Frenaye ... The mystery of the novel, its coiling allure, is not what happens or why but how ...This book is a Roman candle — quick and explosive ... 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 ... The war is not merely her subject...it is the weather in her work, the foundation on which her stories are based — the randomness, confusion, lack of resolution or explanation. And above all, her skepticism of happiness — and her passion for writing about it ... these books snare so much of what is odd and lovely and fleeting in the world. It is work that saved and sustained the writer after unimaginable loss. It buoys us up, too.
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 ... ... 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.
... [Ginsburg's] 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. Her work is so consistently surprising that reading it is something like being confronted with a brilliant child, innocent in the sense of being uncorrupted by habit, instruction, or propriety. Ginzburg wastes no time, and the narratives can zoom around destabilizing hairpin turns. And yet the violence at the heart of each of these books is obdurate—immovable and unassimilable ... How quickly the author has presented us with an entire character! ... While the narrator’s miseries are fertile ground for sentimentality and melodrama, Ginzburg’s uncompromising vision shears the story of both ... The narrator makes no claims on us; we are not wheedled into 'identifying' with her or despising her dreadful husband. We observe the protagonists with the equilibrium of clarity—the wife in her barren cage of isolation and irremediable grief, and the husband in his barren cage of self.
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. A similar technique can be found in a richer and much later Ginzburg novel, Happiness, as Such, from 1975...
Straightforward, direct, often avoiding the complexity of the subordinate clause, Ginzburg’s unmistakable style...[is] haunting and tightly wrought ... At less than a hundred pages, The Dry Heart reads as a brief, intense étude for the themes that would continue to preoccupy Ginzburg for the following decades: family and its quirks and foibles, failed relationships of all kinds, the ways in which history torques its way into domestic life ... [a] brutal but restrained throttle ... [Ginzburg's] fiction is less interested in examining intellectual life than in training an intellectual’s eye on characters with more petite aspirations ... Ginzburg rigorously limits her scope, exploring the vast realms of the social and the political through a smaller scale—the politics of the family—while refraining even from drawing too many conclusions from that. 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.
... cold-blooded ... At one point Ginzburg describes their baby as having 'a faraway, bitter look, unreproaching but at the same time pitiless, as though she had nothing more to ask.' The author’s gaze is similarly chilling. Though a marvel of focus and compression, The Dry Heart pushes the outer limits of how much despair readers will be willing to open themselves up to.
I couldn’t read her novels fast enough. She is an original, no doubt, and partly by virtue of her sharpness, the peculiarly direct and needlelike precision of her prose ... The Dry Heart starts out with a bang, as a neglected and betrayed wife shoots her husband between the eyes. What follows is the bleak history ... Beautifully rendered, there’s not a ray of hope in this account ... The way Ginzburg uses the resources of language is all her own. There’s no metaphoric flourish, no manipulation of tempo and syntax to create excitement; there is simply the juxtaposition of conflicting feeling in simple statements that miraculously add up rather than confuse.
The tone here is thriller-like, but simultaneously tinged with a riper chord of despair ... In Ginzburg’s telling, the crime procedural becomes a cri de coeur against marriage. Compared to the sheer desperation of the narrator’s frame of mind, the details of the murder feel incidental, unimportant. The effect is of reading something almost obscenely personal, and perhaps for that reason, scintillatingly political.
Ginzburg, it’s clear, is a master of the deceptively simple plot. From the beginning, you know how this story will end. Likewise, her prose seems at first to be arid, nearly parched. To say that she’s understated is itself a serious understatement. This slim, swift book—closer in length to a novella than a novel—was first published in Italy in 1947, but it feels chillingly modern in its structure, subject matter, and tone ... Haunting, spare, and utterly gorgeous, Ginzburg’s novel is a classic of the wife-murders-husband variety.
