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 absent, her mother is miserable, her sister's unhappily promiscuous, her brothers are in a separate masculine world. Only her cousin Nini seems to see her. She falls into disgrace and then "marries up, " but without any joy, blind to what was beautiful right before her own eyes. The Road to the City was Ginzburg's very first work, originally published under a pseudonym. "I think it might be her best book, " her translator Gini Alhadeff remarked: "And apparently she thought so, too, at the end of her life, when assembling a complete anthology of her work for Mondadori.