Staff Pick
She is possessed by her desire to possess her husband. Because that's what marriage is, she thinks, you know where your partner is all the time and they are with you most of all. To make a short story even shorter, that's not how it works out and she is left alone in a world where nothing is familiar except the same old dread. So while it is a surprise when she shoots him between the eyes on the very first page, it isn't by the last. It is a thing of terrible beauty, this exploration of the unsolvable mystery of the individual — why doesn't it bother everyone? Or does it? Incandescent with rage, The Dry Heart is a scorched landscape where everything unnecessary has been burned away. Recommended By Lauren P., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
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?
Review
“The Dry Heart is by far Ginzberg's strangest work of fiction, a taught psychological thriller laced with horror about a woman who — very matter-of-factly in the first few sentences — murders her husband.” The Chicago Tribune
Review
“Unvarnished: Ginzburg, it's clear, is a master of the deceptively simple plot….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.” Kirkus (Starred Review)
Review
“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
About the Author
Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991), "who authored twelve books and two plays; who, because of anti-Semitic laws, sometimes couldn't publish under her own name; who raised five children and lost her husband to Fascist torture; who was elected to the Italian parliament as an independent in her late sixties — this woman does not take her present conditions as a given. She asks us to fight back against them, to be brave and resolute. She instructs us to ask for better, for ourselves and for our children" (Belle Boggs, The New Yorker).
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.