“Her prose style is deceptively simple and very complex. Its effect on the reader is both calming and thrilling — that’s not so easy to do.”
“Her sentences have great precision and clarity, and I learn a lot when I read her.”
“I’m always drawn to short novels that pack a punch — Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline (101 pages), Willem Frederick Hermans’s An Untouched House (88 pages), and José Revueltas’s The Hole (79 pages) are all the more powerful for how brief they are. It’s less about finding the time to read Natalia Ginzburg’s The Dry Heart, an 83-page novel about an Italian woman who shoots and kills her husband on page one, than it is preparing yourself for it.”
“If Ferrante is a friend, Ginzburg is a mentor.”
“Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like. This voice emerges from her preoccupations and themes, whose specificity and universality she considers with a gravitas and authority that seem both familiar and entirely original.”
“Filled with shimmering, risky, darting observation.”
“The raw beauty of Ginzburg’s prose compels our gaze. First we look inward, with the shock of recognition inspired by all great writing, and then, inevitably, out at the shared world she evokes with such uncompromising clarity.”
“There is no one quite like Ginzburg for telling it like it is.”
“Ginzburg’s beautiful words have such solidity and simplicity. I read her with joy and amazement.”
“Her simplicity is an achievement, hard-won and remarkable, and the more welcome in a literary world where the cloak of omniscience is all too readily donned.”
By NATALIA GINZBURG
from New Directions
Copyright
Copyright © 1947, 1974, 2001, 2010 & 2018 by Giulio Einaudi Editore SpA, Torino
Translation copyright © 1952 by the Hogarth Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Originally published in Italian as È stato cosi. Published by arrangement with the Estate of Natalia Ginzburg and Giulio Einaudi Editore SpA
Manufactured in the United States of America
New Directions Books are printed on acid-free paper
First published as a New Directions Paperbook (NDP1448) in 2019
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ginzburg, Natalia, author. | Frenaye, Frances, 1908–1996, translator.
Title: The dry heart / Natalia Ginzburg ; translated by Frances Frenaye.
Other titles: È stato cosi. English
Description: New York : New Directions, 2019. | “A New Directions Book.” | English translation originally published by The Hogarth Press Ltd. in 1952.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019004340 | ISBN 9780811228787 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Marriage—Fiction. | Parricide—Fiction. | Murder—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PQ4817.I5 E213 2019 | DDC 853/.912—dc23
eISBN: 9780811228794
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011