The Dry Heart

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Written in cool, detached tones but propelled by fierce emotional currents, it’s no surprise that Ginzburg’s books are adored by everyone from Sally Rooney to Zadie Smith.’ – Stylist Loves Eu pensava como cada um de nós se esforça sempre por adivinhar o que fazem os outros e como cada um de nós se atormenta constantemente imaginando a verdade e se movimenta como um cego no seu mundo escuro tacteando ao acaso as paredes e os objectos.” I have turned this question over and over in my mind since reading Natalia Ginzburg’s The Dry Heart, a grim, anti-Romantic novella about marriage and betrayal. It opens with a bang.

Haunting, spare, and utterly gorgeous, Ginzburg’s novel is a classic of the wife-murders-husband variety. The Dry Heart is about as sad a story as I have ever read. It opens with a wife’s confession that she has shot her husband between the eyes. What follows is an account of everything leading up to this event. Throughout, I wondered how many people there are out there living with people they neither know nor understand, and yet hoping that there will be success just around the corner if they can just hold on long enough. 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. The heart can't pump enough blood to meet the needs of body tissues. The body diverts blood away from less vital organs, particularly muscles in the limbs, and sends it to the heart and brain.

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Alberto is older than his wife, but no wiser, and unable to extricate himself from his lover. They live two lives separately, in separate beds after the birth of the daughter. He disappears periodically. She sees her life narrow to the care of their baby. She has little idea of an alternative to her life. Her cousin Francesca tries to persuade her to leave Alberto. Our protagonista repeatedly expresses disdain for "the country," being from a rural village herself, and her greatest fear, it would seem, is to be labeled "a simple country girl." But I'm now at that point where, while a temporary break from social obligations was initially much welcomed, I've started to somewhat miss interacting with people. Nice people, mind you, not the type who don't even bother to wave when they walk past where I'm sitting on the patio or whatever. I mean, how hard is it just to wave? It's not like your odds of contracting something go up by making such a casual gesture, is it? 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. When a girl is very much alone and leads a tiresome and monotonous existence, with worn gloves and very little spending money, she may let her imagination run wild and find herself defenceless before all the errors and pitfalls which imagination has devised to deceive her. I was a weak and unarmed victim of imagination as I read Ovid to eighteen girls huddled in a cold classroom or ate my meals in the dingy boarding house dining room, peering out through the yellow window panes as I waited for Alberto to take me out walking or to a concert. (6-7)

Spoiler değil, Natalia Ginzburg'un "İşte Böyle Oldu" romanı bu cümlelerle başlıyor ve sonrasında anlatıcımız olan kadını adamı öldürmeye götüren süreci okuyoruz. Natalia Hanım ile tanışma kitabım oldu bu kitap, çok da güzel oldu. burada “öldürülen kocasının yasını tutmaya çalışan bir yazar” olarak yazdığı bu kitap beni çok ilgilendirdi. içeriği, finali -kocasını alnının çatından vurduğunu- en başta söyleyip sonra oraya yavaşça sarmal bir biçimde geri dönmesi, anlatımının o döneme göre basit olması, kadınlık- erkeklik hallerini eşelemesi de beni çok etkilemedi.There’s nothing much to do with Alberto, who is not an unusual or especially interesting man. “He said that he was like a cork bobbing on the surface of the sea, pleasantly cradled by the waves but unable to know what there was at the bottom,” the narrator recalls of the only conversation during their courtship in which Alberto talks about himself. Though she feels unsatisfied—his words “amounted to very little,” she admits—his evocation of the waves and the sea, of the unknown and perhaps unknowable depths of being, spurs her lonely imagination to what she thinks is love. The sensitive quality of his speech animates her desire to know more about his inner life, to “get to the bottom of things and turn them over and over” in the belief that her excavation will be rewarded. But rewarded with what? Not love, and not desire—not exactly. Before they get married, the thought of sleeping with Alberto fills her with “terror and disgust.” He is old, short, ratty, and, predictably, bad in bed. When they make love, she consoles herself with the “tender, feverish words” he whispers in the dark. But she soon discovers that Alberto’s repertoire is limited. Repeating the same words too many times drains them of their meaning, their capacity to delight and intrigue. The cork resurfaces twice, first when Alberto tells the narrator that he still loves Giovanna: “He said she was often unkind to him and his life was entirely without joy. He felt stupid and useless, like a cork bobbing on the water.” The second time, it is as a metaphor and accusation delivered by the narrator: “You’re a cork bobbing on the surface, that’s what you are.” The original simile suddenly, startlingly, loses its depth. Alberto is exposed as a hollow, passive, discardable thing. The choice of the novella offers a cool, impatient response to novel-length performances of male indecision, self-absorption, and sentimentality. Between the walks along a river and this, there lies much disconnect, betrayal, trauma and grief, and it is through her spare and yet artful elaboration of these that Ginzburg meditates on marriage, motherhood, cruelty, the contrariness of our desires, and the dangerous spaces these squeeze people into.

Postwar Italian literature, arguably the country’s most fertile literary moment, was dominated by great writers—great male writers. Calvino would soon go on to become one of them, joining the ranks of Cesare Pavese, Alberto Moravia, Elio Vittorini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Primo Levi, and Carlo Levi. The last woman on earth was hardly an outsider. A principal editor at the prestigious publishing house Einaudi alongside Pavese and Calvino (who left journalism for publishing), she was at the heart of a vibrant literary scene. The intellectual lions of this world were stubbornly defined by politics above all else: they were not Jewish writers or Catholic writers, not Holocaust survivors, feminists, depressed writers, or gay writers. They were just writers. If you were to ask them to define themselves as a group, they would have answered antifascist—which would explain nothing about the literature any one of them produced. Disse-me que tinha de me curar daquele vício que eu tinha de olhar sempre, fixamente, para dentro de mim."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.