flâneur

XXI. On Breakdown - by jamie hood - regards, marcel

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; or, Cruel, Cruel Summer

I recently read a new-to-me novella of Natalia Ginzburg’s, The Dry Heart, which opens with the unnamed narrator shooting her shitbag husband between the eyes. The scene is classic Ginzburg: stylistically spare, almost anesthetized, and yet devastating, a vicious tableau of heterosexual misery. After this, The Dry Heart leaps back to the relationship’s origins—Alberto’s pursuit of the narrator and their period of stuttering courtship, repeating signal flares from the narrator’s best friend (who clocks Alberto’s spinelessness immediately), and the asphyxiating marriage, always already…

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