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.

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.

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)

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

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.