BOOK REVIEW : Searching for Road to Love in Postwar Italy : THE ROAD TO THE CITY <i> by Natalia Ginzburg</i> Arcade Publishing $16.95, 149 pages

In her recently reissued novel “Voices in the Evening,” Natalia Ginzburg let a wide-angle lens sweep through an entire Italian village, offering American readers a panorama of the people and places that have fascinated the author throughout her long career. Now, in two piercing novellas of postwar Italy (written in the 1940s), she narrows her focus to create a pair of extraordinary portraits, letting a small provincial town serve merely as background.

The switch from general to particular has an extraordinary effect upon Ginzburg’s economical style. The language seems newly sensuous, as imagery that once served a large cast of townspeople is lavishly spent upon a few acutely observed characters.

In the title story, a restless and bored country girl yearns for the shallow life her sister has achieved as the indulged wife of a prosperous city man. Never mind that Azalea treats her husband with contempt, neglects her children and flits from one lover to the next, her days a meaningless round of shops and cafes. That’s exactly the life the narrator desires, and we become thoroughly involved as she sets about achieving it, turning in the process from a frivolous innocent into a shrewd and icy manipulator.

In addition to three brothers and sister Azalea, the narrator’s family includes Nini, the orphaned son of her father’s cousin. Unlike the others, Nini is sensitive and literary, with larger ambitions and horizons widened by incessant reading. Although the diarist enjoys Nini’s interest and cares for him as much as her vanity allows, she has no intention of marrying a man who values knowledge more than money. Instead of returning his devotion, she sets her sights upon the village doctor’s son, a pompous dolt named Giulio.

Though Giulio’s family disdains her and Giulio himself has a proper fiancee in the city, that doesn’t stop him from dallying with a willing peasant girl. She becomes pregnant, and after realizing that she cannot be bought off, Giulio’s family reluctantly agrees to a wedding.

Once her condition becomes apparent, the narrator is sent away to an aunt’s house in a neighboring town to avoid the inevitable gossip. There she’s even more indolent than at home, making a spinster cousin a virtual slave as she waits for her marriage to a man whose company she can barely endure.

Throughout this period, she hears news of Nini--bad news, because he’s become an alcoholic, has let his half-hearted relationship with a young widow lapse, and lives in solitary squalor, indifferent to health, work, friends or family. Still the narrator is unmoved, determined to marry her Giulio and move to town, where she too can sleep until noon while a maidservant cares for her child.

Having realized her empty dream, she’s strolling aimlessly in her new neighborhood when she meets one of her brothers and the young widow who once was Nini’s consolation. “It was harder and harder to remember the way (Nini) looked and the things he used to say, and it frightened me to think of him now that he had receded far into the distance and become one of the vast multitude of the dead.”

Beneath this tale of shoddy values is another, more poignant story of the destructive power of provincialism, loneliness and frustration.

“The Dry Heart” shows more complex aspects of love. Again, the female narrator is from a small hill town, but she has become a schoolteacher who lives austerely in a city boarding house, waiting for the glorious romance that still eludes her.

A family friend introduces her to an older man who passively courts her without ever mentioning the marriage she so hopes will transform her life. One day she forces the question, and her suitor agrees to marry her. Though she soon realizes that the bridegroom has no intention of abandoning his married mistress, the narrator has a child and gradually becomes resigned to the vagaries of her enigmatic husband, sustaining herself with romantic fantasies.

When the child dies, her link with reason breaks. Beginning and ending with the stark line “I shot him between the eyes,” “The Dry Heart” is a flawlessly negotiated descent into the deep and dangerous chasm separating love’s fantasies from life’s realities.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “Waiting for Rain” by Indiana Nelson.