On the very first page of this novella we meet with a woman shooting her husband right through the eyes. We then get a mystery in reverse kind of in which the crime is already plain and in sight and we know the guilty party. We also quickly come to understand that this isn’t a “he beat me and even though it wasn’t in direct reaction to a threat” kind of self-defense novel like you get with many others. Instead, this novel explores the callous indifference and indiscretion of being a wife to a man who knows he can and will leave you, treat you carelessly, and act cruelly, while maybe not crossing into the territory of abuse.
What stands out about this novella for me is the directness of the language and the clarity of purpose. This is a novel about the complexities of love and marriage, about interstices and gray areas. Things here are pretty stark and pretty straight forward. What also strikes me really clearly about this novel is that for a novel that was written in 1947 in Italy, right after the war, it has a very strong post-war feeling to it. I mean by this a world that the war wrought, but not a world that is utterly and singularly defined by the war. This is very similar to the world of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, but more so rendered with language and tone and of course subject matter of her earlier novel Days of Abandonment.
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