SOURCE: Katz, Giuliana Sanguinetti. “Sagittarius: A Psychoanalytic Reading.” In Natalia Ginzburg: A Voice of the Twentieth Century, edited by Angela M. Jeannet and Giuliana Sanguinetti Katz, pp. 122-52. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Katz offers a psychoanalytic interpretation of Sagittarius and asserts that the novella is a story about the difficulties women experience in developing a sense of individual identity.

The short novel Sagittarius has often played the part of the unwanted child among Ginzburg's books. It was bitterly criticized by the author herself in the introduction she wrote to the 1964 Einaudi edition of Cinque romanzi brevi (Five Short Novels), where she republished the novel that had first appeared in 1957 in Valentino. In this introduction Ginzburg complained that Sagittarius had two main defects: its plot was too thick and tight and its story too contrived. Ginzburg remembered that she had to work and think...