156 Recall This B-Side #1: Merve Emre on Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Dry Heart”

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network (Recall This Book B-Side Series)
Host: John Plotz
Guest: Merve Emre (Oxford Professor, Author)
Episode: #156 – Merve Emre on Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Dry Heart”
Release Date: September 18, 2025

This episode delves into the intricacies of Natalia Ginzburg’s novella The Dry Heart, focusing on its unique narrative form, its treatment of marriage, and its place as a literary “B-side”—a work that merits more attention than it has received. The conversation explores Ginzburg’s prose, her engagement with romantic tropes, and draws connections to other novella writers. Merve Emre shares insights about her personal fascination with the book’s opening, the allure of the novella form, and recommendations for similar authors.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

What Makes a "B-Side" Book?

• Definition: “A book unjustly kicked to the curb, thrown prematurely on the ash heap of history... odd volumes that slipped through the cracks, went unread, and missed their appointment with posterity.” (John Plotz, 02:28)

“The Dry Heart”: Opening Scene and Its Impact

• Memorable Opening: The novella famously opens with a woman calmly shooting her husband with little immediate explanation, which Emre finds both “grim and also a little bit comic.”
• Personal Fascination:

  “I was frankly just captivated by it as someone who has often fantasized about shooting my own husband and sometimes other people's husbands too.” (Merve Emre, 03:22)

• Narrative Challenge: Starting a story by giving away the ending creates a formal and narrative challenge—where does the story go next?

The Anti-Romantic Novella

• Ginzburg’s narrator is an unnamed woman married to Alberto, a man “fascinated with his own suffering” and a poor reader of Goethe.
• Discussion of how the story satirizes or subverts romanticism:

  “How does an impatient, unsentimental woman deal with a bad reader of the Romantic era?” (Merve Emre, 05:02)

Formal Qualities of the Novella

• The novella’s circularity—giving away the ending and then working back to explain it—parallels the concept of a “B-side,” where value is found in returning to overlooked material.

  “The form of the novella, that insistence on recurrence is... quite similar to how we think about a B side, which is coming back to a story to see how it holds up over time...” (Merve Emre, 05:49)

Rereading, Suspense, and Critical Reading

• Engagement with Michael Warner’s Essay:
  The novella is compared to Warner’s ideas on “uncritical reading”—that critical reading assumes the suspense is gone but “The Dry Heart” embraces this, shifting suspense from “who will die?” to “how much does a person have to endure before they decide to kill?”

  “It sort of backs its way into suspense… switching the focus… to the person who we realize is the real victim… the woman who narrates.” (Merve Emre, 07:01)

Ginzburg’s Style and Emotional Economy

• Emre praises Ginzburg’s “incredibly controlled tone… undergirded by a great deal of suffering.”

  “There’s no fat on the bones of this prose. It's incredibly tight and clean... an almost inarticulable suffering on the part of this narrator.” (Merve Emre, 08:54/09:26)

• The juxtaposition of “the depths of suffering and the incredible calm or the incredible precision of expression” is a central feature for Emre.

Literary Comparisons and Recommendations

• Elena Ferrante: While the comparison is natural, Emre notes Ferrante is “much more explicitly invested in questions of dissolution… being out of control, of being formless and of recovering a kind of form from these moments where your life seems to be falling apart…” (Merve Emre, 10:13)
• Fleur Jaeggy:

  “Her form is primarily the novella... the prose is just kind of crystalline and almost a kind of sociopathic cool, I would say.” (11:23)
  Recommended Sweet Days of Discipline for fans of Ginzburg.

• Rachel Ingalls’ “Mrs. Caliban”:
  Praised for its “post human comedy” and strangeness, another “B-side” that Emre admires.
• The appeal of novellas during motherhood—manageable length and strong emotional impact.

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On the formal challenge of The Dry Heart:

  “When you start a novel... by kind of giving away the ending, where do you go from there? And to me, that's the really fascinating formal challenge that the novella sets up for itself...” (Merve Emre, 03:30)

• On the emotional register of Ginzburg’s prose:

  “You know that what is underneath all of that control, that intense desire for precision, is an almost inarticulable suffering on the part of this narrator.” (Merve Emre, 09:33)

• On literary preferences:

  “Essays that reveal something about the narrator by how they read a work of literature or how they view a painting, creating a kind of relationship of triangulation between the reader, writer, and the object that they are concerned with.” (Merve Emre, 08:21)

• Humor on elusive B-sides:

  “As someone who has often fantasized about shooting my own husband and sometimes other people's husbands too.” (Merve Emre, 03:22)

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Important Timestamps

• [03:05] – Emre describes the opening of The Dry Heart and its narrative intrigue
• [04:30] – On the novella as an “anti-romantic” text and the problem of over-adhesive romanticism
• [05:49] – The novella’s revisiting of its narrative and the “B-side” metaphor
• [06:36] – Discussion of Michael Warner’s essay and suspense in literature
• [08:21] – Ginzburg’s essays and Emre's appreciation for controlled narrative tone
• [10:13] – Comparisons with Ferrante and differences in emotional investments
• [11:23] – Fleur Jaeggy’s “crystalline” style and fit as a Ginzburg companion
• [13:13] – Praise of Rachel Ingalls’ Mrs. Caliban as a worthy B-side

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Conclusion

The episode treats Natalia Ginzburg’s The Dry Heart as a striking example of a “B-side” literary work: concise, underappreciated, and formally inventive. Merve Emre’s critical appreciation highlights not just the novella’s plot, but its performance of emotional restraint and its clever subversion of suspense and romantic conventions. The discussion branches out to embrace the value of the novella form, offer reading recommendations, and ponder what makes for overlooked literary gems—a call for listeners to find and champion their own B-side books.

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Transcript

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[B]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[A]

Hi, I'm Elizabeth Ferri. Welcome to another rebroadcast from the RTB archives.

[B]

From Brandeis University. Welcome to Recall this book where we assemble scholars and writers from different disciplines to make sense of community, contemporary issues, problems and events so specifically. Welcome to Recall this B side a short series of conversations that we undertook as a companion piece to B side Books, which is an edited collection out from Columbia University Press this June. So, hello, I'm Today's host, John Plotz, and my guest today is Oxford professor Merve Emre, prolific and brilliant author of such books as Paraliterary and the Personality Brokers. Now a HBO Max movie, I discovered, and as well as a terrific B side about Natalia Ginsburg's novella the Dry Heart. So, Merve, hello.

[A]

Hello. Thank you for having me.

[B]

Thank you so much for coming. So, dear readers, dear listeners, I hear you asking, what's a B side? Well, it's a book unjustly kicked to the curb, thrown prematurely on the ash heap of history. For three years at Public Books, I've been commissioning writers to sing the praises of odd volumes that slipped through the cracks, went unread, and missed their their appointment with posterity. So it seemed like a good idea at the time for us to invite a few of the B side authors on to recall this book, to talk about their choices and what lay beneath them. Tell us about your B side. Tell us about its author and why you chose it.

[A]

So Natalia Ginsberg's the Dry Heart opens with what is, in my mind, one of the most memorable scenes, which is with a woman coolly picking up a gun to shoot her husband. And we have no idea why she has shot him. All we know is that he has told her that he is going away somewhere, laughed at her, and held up a drawing of a train that he's made and she's shot him. And I think it's brilliantly grim and also a little bit comic. And I was frankly just captivated by it as someone who has often fantasized about shooting my own husband and sometimes other people's husbands too. And so one of the things that was really intriguing to me about Natalia Ginsberg's the Dry Heart was when you start a novel or a novella, as is the case with this one, when you start it by kind of giving away the ending, where do you go from there? And to me, that's the really fascinating formal challenge that the novella sets up for itself, and one that I think Ginsburg answers really brilliantly and in conversation with several of the luminaries of thinking about the novel and its pacing.

[B]

Yeah, you had your opening line, which is also wonderful. The opening line of your piece is when should a woman kill her husband? And then you then go on to call it an anti romantic novella. Maybe that speaks to that same point you're making about the conversation it's having.

[A]

Yeah. So one of the very interesting things to me about the setup of the murder is that we have the novella narrated by an unnamed woman who has been married to a man named Alberto, who is sort of fascinated with his own suffering and is a, I think, unironic and somewhat bad reader of Goethe, and to the point where he and his best friend have actually purchased two pistols to kill themselves together over a woman. They're clearly very sort of earnest readers of the Sorrows of the Young Order. And to me, it was very interesting to see Ginsburg engaging with that question of how does an impatient, unsentimental woman deal with a bad reader of the Romantic era?

[B]

I think you make a point also about the novella maybe being a good place to work out that kind of suspicion of over adhesive romanticism.

[A]

Well, and I also think the novella is a perfect case study for a B side because one of the ways that the Dry Heart works is. Is by giving away the ending and then returning to it to expand on the story, to tell you why it is that the woman has done this, what it is that she has had to suffer in order to come to this point, why she decides to pull the trigger when she pulls it. And in that sense, the form of the novella, that insistence on recurrence is, I think, quite similar to how we think about a B side, which is coming back to a story to see how it holds up over time, or to see, when we read it or tell it again, what aspects of it become visible to us that weren't visible in the first or the second or the third reading or telling.

[B]

Yeah, that's. That's such a great point. I mean, I've just been teaching that Michael Warner piece about uncritical reading. Do you know that?

[A]

I love that piece. Yeah.

[B]

And one thing he says is that one. The. One of the problems with critical reading is that it's always rereading. You know, that it always assumes that the suspense has gone out of it.

[A]

But.

[B]

But your point is that this is a novel, that novella, that actually embraces that notion of taking the suspense out of reading. Right. Because you are.

[A]

Yeah. And it sort of backs its way into suspense, or it shows you that one question or one problem that can be made suspenseful is not who is going to die, but rather, how much does a person have to endure before they decide to kill someone else? And to me, that's a really wonderful way of actually switching the focus of the novella from the ostensible victim, the husband who's killed in the first paragraph, to the person who we realize is the real victim of his bad behavior and his bad reading, which is the woman who narrates.

[B]

Are you a longtime Ginsburg fan, or what brings you back to this?

[A]

No, this is actually the first of her. This was the. Well, I suppose I had read the Little Virtues, the essays that are collected in the Little Virtues, and someone had recommended them to me in part because I had once written a piece on the personal essay as a genre and had expressed a kind of frustration for essays that stage a kind of total evacuation or oversharing of the self and leave sort of nothing to the imagination. And had also expressed a sort of preference for essays that reveal the self by. Through the way the narrator engages with an object. So, for instance, essays that reveal something about the narrator by how they read a work of literature or how they view a painting, creating a kind of relationship of triangulation between the reader, writer, and the object that they are concerned with. And when I wrote that essay, someone wrote to me and said, I think you'll really love Natalia Ginsburg's the Little Virtues. And I read it, and I did. There is a kind of incredibly controlled tone to Ginsburg that is nonetheless, I think, undergirded by a great deal of suffering. And you see that in her essays that are autobiographical. But I think you also see it in the dry heart, which is that there's, you know, there's nothing at all. There's. There's no fat on the bones of this prose. It's. It's incredibly tight and clean.

[B]

Yeah. And it almost feels like smoke dried to me or something.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's sort of. It's sort of withered or something. But. But you know. You know, that what is underneath all of that control, that intense desire for precision, is an almost inarticulable suffering on the part of this narrator. And to me, that kind of. That tension between the depths of suffering and the incredible calm or the incredible precision of expression has always been a very interesting one.

[B]

Yeah. You know, I hadn't realized until this morning when I went on your website that among your many, many other publications, you've also written about Ferrante. So I wonder, do you want to make a Ferrante connection there, or would you?

[A]

Well, I think. I mean, it's a natural connection to make. And I was thinking about how, you know, what would I recommend to people who like reading Ginsburg? But I think Ferrante is much more explicitly invested in questions of disillusion and in questions of being out of control, of being formless and of recovering a kind of form from these moments where your life seems to be falling apart, where you're in shatters, where you can't seem to get a foothold in reality. And I don't think Ginsburg has exactly that same set of formal investments.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But, you know, I do think there's probably something. I think there's probably something they share in terms of a time and a place that they are representing, so.

[B]

Mm. Yeah, No, I. I take your point. Well, so can we pursue that question of, like, people who. If you like Ginsburg, who else might you like? Did you have other thoughts about that?

[A]

I mean, I really like another Italian novelist named Fleurier Guy. Have you read any of her work? She's also. I mean, she also. Her form is primarily the novella.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And she has a wonderful one called Sweet Days of Discipline, Sweet Days of Disc.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Yeah. So Sweet Days of Discipline, which takes place in a girls boarding school and is about the friendship between two of the girls and is similarly just, you know, the prose is just kind of crystalline and almost a kind of sociopathic cool, I would say.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

And beautiful. Just sort of gleaming. Every sentence gleams. And she also has a really strange and memorable essay collection called these Possible Lives, which has three essays on three different writers, among them Keats, whose lives she's sort of reimagining and reading their poetry alongside. So she's probably the first person that I would go to when I think about the novella and how it answers this desire for a kind of surface level control. Yeah, that's actually occluding something really tumultuous and heaving underneath.

[B]

That sounds fantastic. And wow, 101 pages. So that's almost like the quintessential novella.

[A]

It is perfect. The other. I mean, I think I also read Ginsburg at a time when I was really into novellas, in part because my kids were very young, so I could read them kind of quickly and feel some deep sense of accomplishment. But the other, the other sort of story about domestic estrangement that I quite like, that I think fits in here, is by a woman named Rachel Ingalls called Mrs. Caliban. And it's about a housewife who falls in love with a sort of green sea creature who appears one day.

[B]

That is a great novel.

[A]

Yes, it's fantastic. That's another B side that I would have really liked to do, actually, because it's so funny and it's so strange and it's kind of post human comedy is nevertheless extraordinarily human.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And so that's another one that I would have liked very much.

[B]

That's such a great. We did do. We did Maude Elman did David Garnett's lady into Fox, which I think of as kind of in the same world as Mrs. Caliban. But that's great. So, of course, Merve and I hope that you will go out and read and buy the Dry Heart. And we hope that you will buy by the B side books from Columbia University Press on June 1. Whether you do or not, we would love to know your own thoughts about what makes for a great B side. Because I think if you're listening to this, I'm sure you have a book or two or three that you would love to dredge out of the depths and becoming, as Hannah Arendt said about Walter Benjamin, a diver after pearls. So, Merve, thanks for diving with us today. I really thank you.

[A]

Thanks for pulling me up for air.

[B]

It just remains for me to tell you that Recall this Book is sponsored by the Mandel Humanities Center. Music comes from Eric Chaslow and Barbara Cassidy. Sound editing is by our new intern Naomi Cohen, with help from our fabulous departing intern, Claire Ogden. Website design and social media are by Nye Kim. If you enjoyed today's show, please tell your friends about us, write a review or rate us on itunes. Stitcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Which is basically the most important way that word gets out for a modest scholarly podcast like this one. And so please do check out other Recall the B side episodes, among them Pardis Debashi on a ridiculously silly Iranian novel, Caleb Crane on a novel written by a nine year old, and Recall this book's own Elizabeth Ferry. So from all of us here at Recall this Book, thanks for listening.

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