SOURCE: Kakutani, Michiko. “Two Italian Heroines Torn by Loyalties.” The New York Times (17 April 1990): C17.

In the following positive review, Kakutani describes Ginzburg's writing style in The Road to the City as rhythmic, economical, and, ultimately, translucent.

Like many of Natalia Ginzburg's other heroines, the narrators of these two luminous novellas [collected in The Road to the City] are articulate women torn between family loyalties and their own yearnings for independence—avid yet dispassionate observers of life around them. Both leave the stultifying provinces for the big city. Both enter into ill-advised marriages out of need instead of love. And both give birth to babies who unexpectedly alter the direction of their lives.

There, however, the similarities end. While Delia, the narrator of The Road to the City, is one of life's survivors, someone capable of moving on and living carelessly in the present, the nameless narrator of...