‘Happiness, as Such’ by Natalia Ginzburg     (1973) – 162 pages         Translated from the Italian by Minna Zallman Proctor

I suppose now, instead of an epistolary novel, a novel-in-letters, we will get novels-in-emails, perish the thought.

“I remember it now as a happy day. It’s unfortunate that we rarely recognize the happy moments while we are living them. We usually only recognize them with the distance of time.”

Adriana’s son Michele has left Italy for England, and the only way for his mother Adriana and his sisters Angelica and Viola can communicate with him is through letters. The son Michele has left behind a pregnant young woman Mara. Michele might be the father, but Mara admits she also slept with several other men who could also be the father. (After all it is 1973.)

Adriana the mother writes to her son:

“I sometimes think about how little time we’ve spent together, you and me, and how little we know each other. I think how specifically we pass judgment on each other. I think you’re a moron. But I don’t know you’re a moron. Maybe you’re secretly wise.”

Later, the mother writes, ”passing judgment on the intelligence of your own children is a tricky matter”.

Still later, the mother writes her son:

“People who love you may be judgmental, but their vision is clear, merciful, and severe, and they can be rough, but it’s just healthy to face clarity, severity, and mercy.”

Michele writes to his sister Angelica that he has a machine gun hidden in his old room, and his sister must dispose of it. Angelica does so, throwing it in a lake.

Natalia Ginzburg was an Italian writer who was almost forgotten, but was somehow recovered due to the popularity of that other Italian writer Elena Ferrante. One special quality that Ginzburg has is that she can be sad and funny at the same time.

Somehow I just don’t think a novel-in-emails would have quite the same thoughtfulness or impact.

Grade:   B

‘The Dry Heart’ by Natalia Ginzburg (1947) – 88 pages              Translated from the Italian by Frances Frenaye

‘The Dry Heart’ has a dramatic opening as a woman confronts her husband of four years:

“I shot him between the eyes.”

Yes, in this short novella an unnamed woman tells the entire circumstances from the time she first met her husband Alberto until this final shot. This is an unsentimental angry account of how she came to shoot her husband.

At the beginning our unnamed young woman is living a lonely isolated life in a boarding house room and working as a school teacher.

When she meets Alberto who is somewhat older than her, she imagines how wonderful it would be to be married and have a house of her own.

“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.”

Alberto seems like a nice enough guy, but she doesn’t delude herself into believing she is in love with him.

“A girl likes to think that a man may be in love with her, and even if she doesn’t love him in return it’s almost as if she did. She is prettier than usual and her eyes shine; she walks at a faster pace and the tone of her voice is softer and sweeter.”

Nor does she fool herself into believing Alberto is in love with her.

“Before we were married, when we went for a walk or sat in a cafe, Alberto enjoyed my company even if he wasn’t in love with me.”

Alberto does tell her that there is another woman whom he has been in love with for years, but he couldn’t marry her because she was already married. But finally Alberto does ask our young unattached woman whom he doesn’t love to marry him.

Soon after they are married anyway, Alberto begins taking unexplained business trips for weeks at a time, and our young wife begins to suspect that he is seeing this married woman friend again.

I won’t go into any further detail on this simple plot.

– Natalia Ginzburg –

“I write about families because that is where everything starts, where the germs grow.” – Natalia Ginzburg

‘The Dry Heart’ is impressive in that it avoids all sentimentality and is written in a restrained personal style. Natalia Ginzburg wrote in a genre that was known as neorealism which she called “a way of getting close to life, of getting inside life, inside reality”.

‘The Dry Heart’ raises the question, why don’t more wives kill their husbands?

Grade:    A