Finally back in print, a frighteningly lucid feminist horror story about marriage
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?
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...
