The Road to the City

A magnificently stark book-within the smallness of one poor, muddled, provincial life, Natalia Ginzburg finds enormous pain and loss

An almost unbearably intimate novella, The Road to the City concentrates on a young woman barely awake to life, who fumbles through her days: she is fickle yet kind, greedy yet abashed, stupidly ambitious yet loving too-she is a mass of confusion. She's in a bleak space, lit with the hard clarity of a Pasolini film. Her family is no help: her father is largely ...