“When a girl is very much alone and leads a tiresome and monotonous existence,” she explains, “with worn gloves and very little spending money, she may let her imagination run wild and find herself defenseless before all the errors and pitfalls which imagination has devised to deceive her.” In clear and precise prose, the narrator relates how she, a girl from the hill country, came to the city in pursuit of romance. The Dry Heart, a 1947 novella translated from the Italian by Frances Frenaye, begins with the unnamed narrator’s admission of having killed her husband: “I shot him between the eyes.” What follows is a kind of postmortem on the particulars of their failed relationship. Both explore the chasm between the intimacy we desire to have and what our bitter experiences have taught us to expect.

Two of Ginzburg’s books have recently been reissued by New Directions. In many of Ginzburg novels, family is a loneliness compounded by virtue of its being shared. They are islands of misapprehension in a domestic archipelago. Ginzburg’s characters reveal themselves most fully in their unacknowledged weaknesses, the places where their ambition, yearning, disappointment, and pain all hide in plain sight. Out of these illusions, all manner of misunderstandings emerge, some comic (Ginzburg is a very funny writer), and others tragic. A wife may wish for a more loyal husband, or a father a more dynamic daughter, or a mother a smarter son, and in the strength of their desire, believe it is so. Fantasy is the prism through which we glimpse her character’s dissatisfactions with each other. “If my siblings and I were to find ourselves in a dark cave or among millions of people,” she wrote in Family Lexicon, her most celebrated novel, “just one of those phrases or words would immediately allow us to recognize each other.” Ginzburg’s intimate cosmologies are fraught with allusive significance. In the novels of Natalia Ginzburg, family has a private grammar. JArchive of Longing The Domestic Disappointments of Natalia Ginzburg By Dustin Illingworth.

Frankie and zooey salinger