B-sides: Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Dry Heart”
May 12, 2019
When should a woman kill her husband?
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.
“Tell me the truth,” I said.
“What truth?” he echoed. He was making a rapid sketch in his notebook and now he showed me what it was: a long, long train with a big cloud of black smoke swirling over it and himself leaning out of a window to wave a handkerchief.
I shot him between the eyes.
Ginzburg’s narrator will return to the scene of her crime several times to fill in the details…