[In the following positive review, Kakutani describes Ginzburg's writing style in The Road to the City as rhythmic, economical, and, ultimately, translucent.]

Like many of Natalia Ginzburg's other heroines, the narrators of these two luminous novellas [collected in The Road to the City] are articulate women torn between family loyalties and their own yearnings for independence—avid yet dispassionate observers of life around them. Both leave the stultifying provinces for the big city. Both enter into ill-advised marriages out of need instead of love. And both give birth to babies who unexpectedly alter the direction of their lives.

There, however, the similarities end. While Delia, the narrator of The Road to the City, is one of life's survivors, someone capable of moving on and living carelessly in the present, the nameless narrator of The Dry Heart is one of those unfortunates irredeemably scarred by all that happens to her, someone unable or unwilling to forget the past.

The Dry Heart (originally published in Italian in 1947) begins with this narrator soberly announcing that she has just shot her husband. She has taken his revolver out of the desk drawer and shot him between the eyes. “For a long time already,” she says, “I had known that sooner or later I should do something of the sort.”

The rest of her story is a sort of post-mortem of what happened, an explanation of the emotional events that led to the murder. In brisk, straightforward terms, the narrator tells us how she met her husband, how their marriage unraveled, how she came to the realization that it was “too late to start something new like falling in love or having another baby.”

The narrator, it seems, was never really in love with her husband, Alberto—or he with her. Rather, they started spending time together, and she became dependent on his attentions. Unable to put up with the ambiguity of their relationship, she provoked a confrontation, only to learn that the real love of his life was a woman named Giovanna, a married woman he had been seeing secretly for years. Nonetheless, she and Alberto go ahead and marry. She finds his love making repugnant. He continues to see Giovanna. She realizes he is lying to her all the time.

Some of the events leading to the final confrontation between the narrator and her husband are melodramatic: the death of their child, a showdown with Giovanna. Others are more subtle: the day-to-day accumulation of disappointment and hurt; the accelerating erosion of trust and hope; shifts of affection discerned in the way a poem is read, the way a portrait is sketched.

The same clarities of vision and expression are to be found in the other novella in this volume. The Road to the City (originally published in Italian in 1944), a sad, elusive tale about a teen-age girl, her family and friends that is reminiscent of an early Fellini film in its episodic evocation of small-town Italian life. The complex net of familial relationships and social pieties that obtain in Delia's village, the fragmentation of traditional values that is occurring there and in the nearby city, the mood of boredom and dreamy expectancy that afflicts Delia and her friends—all are fluently conjured up by Ms. Ginzburg.

In rebellion against the provincialism of their parents, many of the young people in Delia's circle have embraced a desultory, improvisatory attitude toward life: her sister, Azalea, cheats on her husband with a succession of casually selected lovers; her brother, Giovanni, scorns a regular job for quicker, more dubious forms of employment; their friend Nini lives with a woman named Antonietta, whom he plans to leave.

As for 17-year-old Delia, she flirts openly with Nini but starts sleeping with the son of her parents' wealthy neighbors—an officious medical student named Giulio, who is forced to marry her when she becomes pregnant with his child. For Giulio and Delia, the marriage is simply a way to avoid dishonor and public humiliation. For Nini, who has fallen desperately in love with Delia, it is a disaster.

“What made me suffer,” he tells her, “was to know that you, you with your hair and voice, were going to have a baby, that your love for him might change your life and make you forget me entirely. My life will be just the same: I'll go on working at the factory and reading my books and bathing in the river when it's hot.”

Nini's life, of course, will not be the same: Delia's marriage will send him into a swift downward spiral of anguish and self-pity, while Delia will embrace her new life with cold-blooded practicality. She will look back on Nini and she will think, “It was harder and harder to remember the way he looked and the things he used to say.”

In narrating these developments, Ms. Ginzburg never raises her voice, never strains for effect, never judges her creations. Though blessed with the rhythms and tensile strength of verse, her language is economical and spare, subordinate to the demands of the story. Like Chekhov, she knows how to stand back and let her characters expose their own lives, their frailties and strengths, their illusions and private griefs. The result is nearly translucent writing—writing so clear, so direct, so seemingly simple that it gives the reader the magical sense of apprehending the world for the first time.