The Dry Heart, by Natalia Ginzburg

 

A young woman’s loveless marriage drives her to the brink.

The Dry Heart opens with a startling revelation. The unnamed narrator reveals she has shot her husband between the eyes. To find out why, we are taken back four years to the beginning of her relationship with Alberto, a man over a decade her senior. Their relationship was not passionate from the beginning, Alberto confessing to a prior love, a woman named Giovanna whom he still meets clandestinely. Complicating matters is Augusto, Alberto’s good friend. He doesn’t particularly like the narrator and the two can barely tolerate each other, except when it suits their own interests. The freewheeling friend of the narrator, Francesca, adds more drama to this already explosive mix. 

Tensions escalate when the narrator has a baby and finds herself even more isolated. Loneliness had stalked her life, making her vulnerable to a loveless relationship with a man who physically repulsed her. Finding herself emotionally cornered, she hits out. 

First published in 1947 by Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg, The Dry Heart reads as very contemporary, almost like something by Rachel Cusk or Jhumpa Lahiri. It’s sparse and forensic in its dissection of a very unhealthy marriage, one full of pathetic neediness and cruel indifference. Ginzburg brilliantly sustains an unrelenting tension as the narrator finds herself boxed into a corner, desperately needing release from her hopeless situation. 

An expertly told psychological thriller that reads as very modern indeed.

The Dry Heart, by Natalia Ginzburg. Published by Daunt Books. $19.99

JAN22

The Road to the City, by Natalia Ginzburg

 

A young Italian woman tries to gain independence from her family, but walks into tragedy

Delia is seventeen and living with her oppressive family. Their small house in a poor Italian village is bursting with three younger brothers and a distant cousin, Nini, who has lived with the family since he was a young boy. An older sister, Azalea, has married and moved away. Delia's parents are unhappy, her mother angry and resentful at her lot in life, and her father largely apathetic. Now that Delia is seventeen, it's her mission to get married and get out. To escapes life's boredom and terrible home life, Delia takes trips to the city.

Walking the road to the city with Nini one day she meets a doctor's son, Giulio. He gives her a quail that he'd hunted. He is studying medicine and has prospects. And so Delia and Giulio start up a relationship. It's not a particularly passionate one, more a means to an end. There are roadblocks in the way to marriage, most notably Giulio's mother, who is openly hostile to Delia. The callous way they openly talk about each other is so crass it's almost funny. Things take a turn for the predictable when Delia finds herself pregnant and her mother, in a tough-as-nails piece of negotiation, fronts Giulio's family and secures a respectable marriage.

Despite this looming betrothal, Delia has been growing closer and closer to Nini, her distant cousin. Her pregnancy and marriage cause all sorts of turmoil for the pair, leading to tragedy.

Natalia Ginzburg's pithy novella The Road to the City is by turns riveting family drama and black comedy. Every page details the emotional twists and turns of a group of young, poor Italians, trying to get ahead in hopeless circumstances. An air of resignation permeates everything, especially for the women who are economically dependent and worked to the bone. Ginzburg is brutally candid about the drudgery of motherhood, painting it almost as a curse.

My mother always said children were serpents' teeth and that no one had any business bringing them into the world. Indeed she spent all her days cursing her children, one by one.

The scenes in the hospital when Delia has had her baby are almost farcical, as she can't be bothered attending to the infant and dreads going home where the real work of changing nappies and feeding will begin. Such a frank assessment of children and child rearing, determinedly wiping the gloss off the usually sainted image of motherhood, makes this a startlingly modern work of fiction.

A short, sharp and satisfyingly honest portrayal of loveless marriage and hated domesticity.

The Road to the City, by Natalia Ginzburg. Published by Daunt Books. $19.99

JAN22

Family Lexicon, by Natalia Ginzburg

 Natalia Ginzburg's classic autobiographical novel of family life during wartime.

Ostensibly written as a novel, renowned Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon reads mostly like a comic memoir. Despite there being plenty of hardship and heartache throughout, the tone is kept light as a souffle. Novels usually have some plot, or if no plot, then central characters to focus on, but Family Lexicon has a diffuse feel, jumping from person to person. Ginzburg's father, however, does work as a centrifugal force in the book's narrative, along with mother Lidia, both of whom are eccentrics in their own way. Giuseppe is always thundering his disapproval at this, that and the other, variously describing the idiocies of the world as “doodledums” and “nitwitteries”. Lidia, more sanguine, but zany nonetheless, enjoys art and all things beautiful, passing idiosyncratic comments on the fashions of the day. She is forever youthful, blessed with a lightness of being.

Bubbling away behind the broad cast of characters is the looming Second World War. The family is staunchly anti-fascist. They are also of Jewish origins. With the Germans advancing, they are forced to go into hiding. Young Natalia marries resistance organiser Leone Ginzburg, who is tortured and dies in prison, but this fact is remarked upon almost in passing. Through all these tragedies and difficulties, the family ploughs ahead, their same old sense of humour and interpersonal relations intact, seemingly unchanged by war. Perhaps this is one of the novel's central themes: war affects people differently, and life does go on, despite everything.

While the narrative does sometimes have a feeling of stasis, surprising considering the dramatic events of Mussolini, fascism and war, Family Lexicon has the comic tone of Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals. A humane and generous portrait, but one that captures all the maddening imperfections of family life. 

Family Lexicon, by Natalia Ginzburg. Published by Daunt Books. $19.99

A Woman, by Sibilla Aleramo

 

An early Italian feminist classic for readers of Elena Ferrante

Sibilla Aleramo (1876 – 1960) was an Italian feminist and writer. Her real name was Marta Felicina Faccio, but she wrote under a pseudonym. In 1906 she published her debut novel, the autobiographical Una Donna (A Woman).

The unnamed narrator tells of her girlhood in Milan. She adores her father, who indulges her with a fair amount of independence. All is not good at home, though. Her mother is clearly stifled by the narrow confines of her life, looking after three children, and is suffering serious mental health issues. The expected role of Italian women at this period is to be obedient to their husbands and eschew any kind of ambition.

The father soon gets a business opportunity in the south of Italy running a factory and the family pulls up stumps and leaves. By now the narrator is a teenager and also works at the factory. When a young man shows an interest in her, she tries to gently push him away, but ends up raped. Extraordinarily, she feels obliged to marry him. And so begins a life of misery and madness. They have a child, the marriage is endured for many years until a crisis is reached and a terrible choice must be made.

Una Donna comes down to us today a remarkably modern novel. There is not much about it that is dated or out of place. The writing is clear and simple (if at times a touch florid), describing in calm tones the suffocating and repressive lot of Italian women at the beginning of the 20th century. It is also avowedly feminist, calling out in a firm, reasoned voice the need for women to be treated with respect as intelligent beings. Aleramo spends a lot of time in Una Donna discussing the inner life of women – the emotional, intellectual and creative – and highlighting the need to access those freedoms that nourish mind, body and soul.   

Highly respected in Italy, this fresh, accessible translation should bring Sibilla Aleramo many new readers in English.

A Woman, by Sibilla Aleramo. Penguin Modern Classics. $22.99

First published at northmelbournebooks.com.au November 2020