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WORK TITLE: Ties
WORK NOTES: trans by Jhumpa Lahiri
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 2/15/1943
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Italian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domenico_Starnone * http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-novel-of-infidelity-in-dialogue-with-elena-ferrantes-the-days-of-abandonment
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born February 15, 1943, in Saviano, Italy; married Anita Raja (a literary translator).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist, screenwriter, and fiction writer; former teacher.
AWARDS:Premio Strega, 2001, for Via Gemito.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Domenico Starnone is a journalist, screenwriter, and fiction writer who has achieved both popular and critical success. Born in Saviano, near Naples, he lives in Rome with his wife Anita Raja, a literary translator. Because of thematic similarities between Starnone’s books and those of pseudonymous novelist Elena Ferrante, who gained international acclaim for her “Neapolitan” series, journalists have speculated that Ferrante is actually Starnone. He has emphatically denied this, stating that his choice of subject matter is not unusual and pointing out that several male authors, perhaps most notably Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, have written sympathetically from the viewpoints of unhappy women. In 2016, Italian journalist Claudio Gatti alleged that Ferrante’s real identity is Anita Raja.
Via Gemito
Among Starnone’s most acclaimed novels is Via Gemito, which received Italy’s most prestigious literary prize, the Premio Strega award. Set in Naples and covering the years from the onset of World War II to the dawn of the new millennium, it is narrated by Mimi as he looks back over his quiet life as the only son of a frustrated egotistical artist father, Federi, and submissive mother, Rusine. As World Literature Today contributor Peter Cocozzella pointed out, Starnone exploits the Oedipal theme in this material but also does much more, regaling readers “with the multifarious renditions of Mimi’s recollections” and revealing the ironies in the “sharp contrast between the stifling societal ambience [of Neapolitan bourgeois life] and the natural splendor of one of the most beautiful cities in the world.”
The reviewer also admired the postmodern elements in the book. Cocozzella noted that Starnone uses metafictional and ekphrastic techniques, and creates “strand of nihilism” through the use of Federi’s obscene voice, which the reviewer described as “the cynical sneer of a deconstructive daemon.” The book ends with its characters and readers staring into the abyss, said Cocozzella, and “a sense of the tragic paradox of it all dawns upon us.”
First Execution
In First Execution a retired teacher, Domenico Stasi, learns that his former student Nina has been arrested on charges of terrorism. He worries that he might somehow have misled her, and contacts her in hopes that she will reassure him of her innocence. But she calmly declares that she is in fact guilty. And she goes on to manipulate him into executing a seemingly innocent task that, it turns out, may make him complicit in something horrific.
Perspectives are made more complicated when Domenico Starnone, the author, enters the story and becomes one of its characters. Like Stasi, he is a retired teacher, and he offers his thoughts on politics, injustice, and responsibility. “A constant refrain” in the novel, said a contributor to the Reading Matters website, “is to what extent we bear personal responsibility for the state of the society we live in.” In examining these themes, the reviewer observed, Starnone takes readers on “an electrifying ride that feels like a psychological thriller on one level and a deeply philosophical [meditation] about the state of the world on another.”
Ties
Ties, translated by novelist Jhumpa Lahiri at the author’s invitation, is arguably Starnone’s best-known novel among English-language readers, and tells a story that bears many similarities to Ferrante’s novel Days of Abandonment. Both novels explore the dynamics of an unhappy marriage and adultery. But unlike Ferrante’s book, which focuses on the viewpoint of the wronged wife who is its protagonist, Ties offers three distinct narratives, each with a different point of view: wife’s, husband’s, and the children’s. As Stiliana Milkova observed on the Asymptote website, “Ferrante privileges a feminine subjectivity grounded in the female body, whereas Starnone prefers a polyphonic approach.”
The book’s first section is structured as a series of letters written by the wife, Vanda, to her unfaithful husband, Aldo. They convey her bitterness toward him for abandoning the family, and the extent to which the burdens he left her with–child raising, household responsibilities–have exhausted her, both physically and emotionally. In part two, which focuses on Aldo’s point of view, the now-elderly couple go on vacation together; in their absence, their apartment is burglarized and wrecked. Andrew Martino, writing in World Literature Today, commented that the metaphor of the ruined home “would be too easy here except that Starnone sets the scene decades after Aldo’s infidelity and abandonment. What follows is a remarkable study in manliness and the role of husband and father” that also delves into the lasting emotional legacy of betrayal and abandonment. In part three, the couple’s adult children, who have all moved away from their childhood home, offer their perspective on the family, and the ways in which parents’ smallest word or gesture can cause unintended harm.
A writer for Kirkus Reviews, noting that the book does not present a comprehensive picture because it omits the voice of Aldo’s lover, Lidia, described Ties as a mere “snapshot, a sliver” that nevertheless offers a “stunning meditation on marriage, fidelity, honesty, and truth.” London Observer contributor Anthony Cummins also expressed high praise for the book, concluding that the story “glints and cuts like smashed crystals.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2017, review of Ties.
World Literature Today, summer-autumn, 2001, Peter Cocozzella, review of Via Gemito, p. 204; September-October, 2017, Andrew Martino, review of Ties, p. 75.
ONLINE
Asymptote, http://www.asymptotejournal.com/ (November 17, 2017), Stiliana Milkova, review of Ties.
International Noir, http://internationalnoir.blogspot. com/ (June 2, 2009), Glenn Harper, review of First Execution.
London Guardian Online, http://www.theguardian.com/ (November 17, 2017), Lizzy Davies, “Who is the Real Italian Novelist Writing as Elena Ferrante?”
London Observer Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (March 26, 2017), Anthony Cummins, review of Tie.
MostlyFiction Book Reviews, http://mostlyfiction.com/ (March 4, 2009), Mary Whipple, review of First Execution.
Reading Matters, https://readingmattersblog.com/ (July 11, 2015), review of First Execution.
Three Monkeys Online, http://www.threemonkeysonline.com/ (November 17, 2017), Andrew Lawless, review of First Execution.
Domenico Starnone
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Domenico Starnone (born 1943) is an Italian writer, screenwriter and journalist.
Born in Saviano, near Naples, he has worked for several newspapers and satirical magazines, including L'Unità, Il Manifesto, Tango, and Cuore, usually about episodes of his life as a high school teacher. He also works as screenwriter.
The movies La scuola (by Daniele Luchetti) and Denti (by Gabriele Salvatores) are based on his books.
His most appreciated book is Via Gemito, which won the Premio Strega in 2001. It was suggested in 2006[1] that the mysterious writer Elena Ferrante, author of L'amore molesto and I giorni dell'abbandono, is Starnone himself.
Starnone is married to Anita Raja, the literary translator who was unmasked as famed author Elena Ferrante in a report by the Italian investigative journalist Claudio Gatti in 2016. [2]
Selected bibliography[edit]
Ex cattedra (1988)
Il salto con le aste (1989)
Segni d'oro (1990)
Fuori registro (1991)
Sottobanco (1992)
Eccesso di zelo (1993)
Appunti sulla maleducazione di un insegnante volenteroso (1995)
Denti (1996)
La retta via (1997)
Via Gemito (2000)
Prima esecuzione (2007)
Lacci (Ties, 2014)
Who is the real Italian novelist writing as Elena Ferrante?
As the fame of the Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay author grows, so does the guessing game about her identity
Naples, Italy: Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan books feature two heroines growing up after the second world war. Photograph: Ken Welsh / Alamy
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Lizzy Davies in Rome
Wednesday 15 October 2014 17.47 BST
First published on Wednesday 15 October 2014 16.08 BST
Elena Greco knows what it is to be a writer with a public face. She knows the thrill of her name in print and the satisfaction of telling the doubters back home: I did it. But she also knows the pitfalls of tying one’s identity to a tell-all novel: the facile media, the unkind critics, and the cringing embarrassment of old friends trawling through the “dirty bits” with raised eyebrows and judgmental zeal.
Greco, however, is a fictional character, the narrator of a three – soon to be four – novel series about the lives of two young women in postwar Italy. In stark contrast to her fictional heroine, the writer who created her shuns the limelight completely, to the extent that no one, except a handful of people close to her, knows who she is. Over the past two decades Elena Ferrante – a pseudonym, of course – has become one of her country’s most exciting and compelling contemporary literary voices. And, as her celebrity grows, so too does the guessing game surrounding her identity.
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
Amid a slew of new, overwhelmingly positive pieces in anglophone publications, including the New Yorker, following a new English translation of Storia di chi fugge e chi resta (Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay), the mystery was reignited, in faintly farcical tones, in Rome this week when a prominent male novelist, who for years has been touted as “the real Ferrante”, was forced again to deny he was the elusive writer.
“Put yourself in my shoes,” pleaded an exasperated Domenico Starnone, who, like Ferrante, was born in the southern city of Naples. “I have an idea [for a book]. And because everyone thinks I am Ferrante, I am supposed to ditch my idea?” He was challenged by a journalist interviewing him for La Repubblica to explain why, given the rumours, he would choose to write a novel with “unequivocal” similarities to Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment (I giorni dell’abbandono) in which she recounts, in the first-person, the despair of a woman left by her husband for a younger woman.
“Mrs Ferrante is not the only one to have written about abandoned women, you know,” Starnone was quoted as saying. “Why are we not talking about the link between Starnone and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina?”
For almost a decade both he and his wife have been whispered about as the real authors of Ferrante’s works, including her celebrated Neapolitan novels. But, beyond their shared roots in Naples, Starnone insists there is nothing to link them. “Let’s say I am Ferrante, or that my wife is,” he said. “Explain to me one thing: given that it is so rare, in this mud puddle that is Italy, to have international reach, why would we not make the most of it? What would induce us to remain in the shadow?”
Author Domenico Starnone Photograph: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images
Starnone is not the only one irritated by the persistent association of their names. On Twitter last month journalist Costanza Rizzacasa d’Orsogna fumed at “the ferocious sexism of thinking that, as she is so good, Elena Ferrante must be the pseudonym of a man”.
In a letter to her editor, Sandra Ozzola, in 1991, Ferrante explained why she would not be doing any publicity for her first novel, L’amore molesto, published in 1992 and in 2006 in English as Troubling Love. “I’ve already done enough for this long story: I’ve written it,” she said.
L’amore molesto
“If the book is worth something, it should be enough. I will not participate in debates and conferences, if I am invited. I will not go to accept prizes, if I am given any. I will never promote the book, above all on television, in Italy or, should the need arise, abroad. I will only participate through writing, but I will also try to keep this to the bare minimum.”
While her desire for anonymity may seem incomprehensible to some writers, it is understood perfectly by others. At the Rome international literature festival in June, the Indian-American author Jhumpa Lahiri took centre-stage at an event devoted to Ferrante, who may – or may not – have been present in the mostly female audience.
“How wonderful it is that you are a writer able to communicate with the world through your words only, your literature only. If I had had the same courage, I would also have liked to pursue my literary career in the same way,” said Lahiri, reading from an open letter to Ferrante in the Italian she set about perfecting after reading The Days of Abandonment.
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She continued: “To those who consider you an absent writer, I would say: anything but. Despite your elusiveness, I detect a door that is more open than closed. As I myself now feel too much in the public eye, I try to close the door, limit the amount of contact I have with the public. By avoiding that completely, you seem to me, in some ways, a more transparent writer. Thanks to the mask that makes you invisible, you are able to write and reveal anything.”
Her approach is also appreciated by writers who have chosen, in varying ways, to avoid baring all. Donna Leon, an American writer based at the other end of Italy from Naples, in Venice, has seen her Commissario Brunetti detective novels published around the world – but she refuses to let them be published in Italian for fear it will spoil her relative invisibility.
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“I’m real famous in Germany … and I don’t think it does anybody any good,” she told the Guardian. “I was 50 when this happened to me and I had the good sense to realise that it would be better in a little place [like Venice]. No Italian has ever said anything bad about the books; no Italian has ever opposed anything I’ve said in the books or been offended by it, which makes me very happy. But I don’t think it’s good to be famous. I’ve never seen a case where it is.”
In her 1991 letter, Ferrante joked to Ozzola – who, with her co-editor husband, Sandro Ferri, is one of the very few people who know her true identity – that she would be “the cheapest author in the publishing house” (Edizioni e/o]) because of her no-publicity stance. Cynical observers might argue that, in fact, Ferrante’s refusal to reveal herself has proved a most effective PR tool.
“More than in her books, Ferrante’s strength lies in her not being here, her huge distance from everything,” wrote Paolo di Paolo in La Stampa this week. Arguing that there was something disproportionate in the adulation reserved for Ferrante compared with the limp reception usually given to Italian authors by anglophone critics, he said there was a cluster of contemporary talents who were just as deserving of praise but who lacked an accompanying authorial mystery.
“Some will object that in literature the game of pseudonyms is fair play. Yes, but it is rare they last for more than 20 years,” he said. “And anyway … it’s far less interesting than a life, a face, a real experience.”
Domenico Starnone is an Italian writer, screenwriter and journalist. He was born in Naples and lives in Rome. He is the author of thirteen works of fiction, including First Execution (Europa, 2009), Via Gemito, winner of Italy's most prestigious literary prize, the Strega.
Starnone, Domenico: TIES
(Jan. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Starnone, Domenico TIES Europa Editions (Adult Fiction) $16.00 3, 7 ISBN: 978-1-60945-385-5
Four years after leaving his wife and children, Aldo returns to them, ready to rebuild.Starnone's (First Execution, 2009, etc.) latest work begins with a bang: "In case it's slipped your mind, Dear Sir, let me remind you: I am your wife. I know that this once pleased you and that now, suddenly, it chafes." So Vanda writes in a letter to her husband, Aldo, who's left her, and their children, for a younger woman. It's a familiar enough narrative, repeated often enough in Western literature and popular culture to seem cliched, banal even. But it's Starnone's exquisite artistry that sculpts this story into something much finer. The first portion of the slim book is taken up with Vanda's letters to Aldo, letters sent over the course of the years he is away from home. But the second section skips several decades ahead. Vanda and Aldo are together again. They have been away on holiday and, when they return, find their house ransacked: furniture overturned, glass broken, books and boxes of papers of all sorts scattered everywhere, trampled underfoot. It seems that thieves have been by in their absence. The break-in forces a kind of confrontation between Vanda and Aldo and the past they haven't spoken of in years. Starnone's work is subtle and nuanced, and, in Lahiri's elegant translation, his prose is fluid and clear. It is by no means comprehensive. You will not hear from all sides; you will hear hardly anything from Lidia, Aldo's "other woman," for example. The book is a snapshot, a sliver of a marriage. It is as vivid and devastating as anything you will read this year. A slim, stunning meditation on marriage, fidelity, honesty, and truth.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Starnone, Domenico: TIES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475357439&it=r&asid=a13af6bc82231eead34c4596859506fa. Accessed 23 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475357439
Domenico Starnone. Ties
Andrew Martino
91.5 (September-October 2017): p75.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Domenico Starnone. Ties . Trans. Jhumpa Lahiri. New York. Europa Editions. 2017. 150 pages.
Domenico Starnone is the author of more than a dozen literary works of fiction in his native Italy, and thanks to Europa Editions in the United States, we are finally getting his works in English translation. In 2009 Europa published First Execution, translated by Antony Shugaar, and now we have Ties , in a remarkable translation by the author Jhumpa Lahiri. Both novels are tightly executed examinations of human relationships in the modern world, a world where the wires that connect us to a semblance of security are becoming increasingly frayed.
Ties is a novel about family. It's about the relationships between husband and wife, their children, and their pets. It's also about attachments, both physical and psychological. But perhaps most subtly, Ties is about the relationships between the translator and the text and the author and his readers. Ties is divided into three parts, each exploring the ramifications of the husband's infidelity and his abandonment of his family. Starnone has stated that each part can be read as an autonomous whole, as a novella, with certain links that connects the parts.
Part 1 is told from the wife, Vandas, point of view in the form of letters to her husband, Aldo. The novel's striking beginning sets the scene for what comes over the next 150 pages. "In case it's slipped your mind, Dear Sir, let me remind you: I am your wife." The tone in the first part is one of bitterness and betrayal. It shows an abandoned wife slowly unraveling as she struggles to carry the burden of her children, the upkeep of the house, bills, and life in general. Despite this, the wife demonstrates a steely resolve whose condemnations of her husband, however justified, never feel quite right to the reader.
Part 2 is told from Aldo's point of view. It is the longest of the three parts and reads more like a dispassionate report of events that lead up to and beyond the abandonment of his family. The second part begins with Aldo and Vanda, now elderly, about to go on vacation. When they return they find that their home has been broken into and wrecked. The metaphor of the wrecked home would be too easy here except that Starnone sets the scene decades after Aldos infidelity and abandonment. What follows is a remarkable study in manliness and the role of husband and father. Moreover, it takes us deep into the dark places left in the wake of that infidelity and abandonment.
Part 3 is told from Aldo and Vanda's children's point of view, now grown and living away from their childhood home. This is perhaps the most tragic part of all. It shows us that parents have the capacity to screw up their children in even the smallest ways.
Ties is an extraordinary novel. Most striking is that Ties reveals that beneath our manufactured roles of husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, and of children, we are all human, deeply flawed and often with irrepressible desires and drives.
Andrew Martino
Southern New Hampshire University
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Martino, Andrew. "Domenico Starnone. Ties." World Literature Today, vol. 91, no. 5, 2017, p. 75+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA502351934&it=r&asid=04ff79b9b4a6d91eee558d10b1503012. Accessed 23 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502351934
Via Gemito. (Fiction)
Peter Cocozzella
75 (Summer-Autumn 2001): p204.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Domenico Starnone. Via Gemito Milan. Feltrinelli. 2000. 389 pages L.32,000. ISBN 88-07-01576-5
HERE IS MIMI, a first-person narrator, driven by a compulsive urge to cast a far-reaching glance all over his past, which encompasses the period from the inception of World War II to the present. Behind Mimi we discern Domenico Starnone, a prolific Italian writer, who translates his highly self-conscious dedication to his metier into a matrix of creativity. Starnone's agenda is a protracted meditation on life and art. From Mimi's point of view, creativity is a function of an engrossing inner probing, out of which a text is born. And his text keeps grappling our imagination with a plethora of epiphanies. In Via Gemito Starnone regales his reader, relentlessly, inventively, with the multifarious renditions of Mimi's recollections. The stage for this more or less eventful history is the small world of the Neapolitan bourgeoisie. In more subtle ways than one, Starnone brings out the ironies inherent in the sharp contrast between the stifling societal ambience and the natural splendor of one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
There is much to be said about the psychological aspect of the autobiographical narrative, which may be read, in the main, as an obsessive contemplation of an overpowering figure -- that of the father, Federi. Federi is a Sisyphus in civilian garb: a painter of no mean talent, but grandiose ambition, whose unhappy lot it is to contend with less than propitious circumstances. Thus, the frustrated, embittered megalomaniac ekes out a living as a low-echelon administrator of the national railroad system.
Starnone invites an open-ended speculation into the existential space determined by the triangle, which includes, naturally, besides the narrator and his domineering father, his submissive mother, Rusine, a less prominent but no less significant other. It is fair to say that Starnone's scope projects beyond the much-too-common Oedipal subtext. Here serious psychological analysis gives way to an adventurous journey into the vast regions of an esthetic yet to be charted. The journey comes to a critical point in some key moments, defined by what may be called the phenomenology of the proverbial madeleine a la Marcel Proust. In fact, each of the three parts which make up Starnone's sizable Via Gemito constitutes an ingenious elaboration on a signal Proustian moment. First there is the startling apparition of an imposing peacock in the master bedroom of the family apartment. Then a special personage comes into focus: a young boy, Mimi himself, who, while serving as his father's model, fancies his own metamorphosis into an artistic image of the type created by Velazquez or Manet. Third, we hit upon the haunting portrait of an accomplished ballroom dancer.
Starnone proposes innovations which critics may well be inspired to take into account attentively. He opens up wide perspectives into the realm of the postmodern. The areas he delves into may be described, broadly, as metafictional and, more specifically, ekphrastic, in view of the protagonist's persistent musings on the painterly analogue. Not to be missed in the rich texture of Via Gemito is, also, a strand of nihilism, brought out by a hefty crop of fulsome vulgarities, couched in the Neapolitan dialect. In these fetid formulaic obscenities, invariably recorded in the father's voice, it is possible to perceive the cynical sneer of a deconstructive daemon. Toward the end of the spectacle of sound and fury, dramatized in this Via Gemito -- which means, literally, "Sob Street" -- we hear Federi exclaim, "Tutto passa" (Everything will come to an end), a maxim iridescent with semiotic tonalities, laced, not surprisingly, with a stream of juicy Neapolitan expletives. Then we stand at the edge of the abyss "signifying nothing," and a sense of the tragic paradox of it all dawns upon us.
Peter Cocozzella
Binghamton University
Cocozzella, Peter
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Cocozzella, Peter. "Via Gemito. (Fiction)." World Literature Today, vol. 75, 2001, p. 204. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA82262986&it=r&asid=913c44d6a9d7d3eb073a45a388065b2a. Accessed 23 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A82262986
Stiliana Milkova reviews Ties by Domenico Starnone
Translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri (Europa Editions, 2017)
Domenico Starnone’s Ties, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri, lends itself to two different approaches. It can be accessed through its apparent connection, its tie, as it were, to Elena Ferrante’s 2003 novel I giorni dell’abbandono (The Days of Abandonment, translated into English by Ann Goldstein) and thus through the topical question of Ferrante’s identity. Or it can be read on its own, as a chronicle of male infidelity and the subsequent unraveling of a marriage, a theme that ties the novel to a long-standing Western literary tradition. The intertextual dialogue of Ties with Ferrante’s novel must be acknowledged even if only to be filed away.
Both Starnone’s and Ferrante’s novels deal with a case of adultery in apparently similar ways: after years of a seemingly happy marriage, the husband abandons his wife and two children for a much younger woman. The wife’s life falls apart, she collapses physically and psychologically, reaches the depths of abjection, then emerges scarred but whole. In Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment, we inhabit the wife’s psyche as we read her viscerally brutal first-person narrative recounting her life before, during, and after the abandonment. In Starnone’s Ties, we examine the anatomy of abandonment from three different points of view and in three distinct narratives—the wife’s, the husband’s, and the children’s. In Ties the wife’s narration is matter-of-fact, punctilious even, and hence unlike the illogical, kaleidoscopic, and gut-wrenching account of Ferrante’s narrator. Whereas Ferrante’s novel does not explore the long-term aftermath of the husband’s infidelity, Starnone’s digs deep into its effects over a period of five decades. Ferrante privileges a feminine subjectivity grounded in the female body, whereas Starnone prefers a polyphonic approach.
The differences between the two novels do not end here, but Starnone’s Ties and Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment do enter into dialogue with each other inasmuch as they treat similar subjects, and inasmuch as literary texts are always engaging other literary texts. Yet, I am puzzled by the attention reviewers of Ties both in Italy and the United States have paid to the Ferrante-Starnone relationship, dwelling on Ferrante’s alleged and sensational unmasking by the Italian journalist Claudio Gatti in October last year, as Anita Raja, Starnone’s wife. Fuelled by the mystery of Ferrante’s identity, an intertextual dialogue between two Italian novels has become an intramarital issue. And, if we lend an ear to Claudio Gatti, Ferrante’s success as a woman writer can be explained not by her literary talent alone, but rather by her marriage to Starnone, a prolific male writer of considerable renown in Italy. In the case of Ties, however, this fallacy might work in Starnone’s favor. American readers are more familiar with Elena Ferrante than with Domenico Starnone and thus might be spurred to pick up a copy of his novel, especially given that it has been translated into English by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri. For the American audience then, Ties arrives through the literary mediation of not one but two successful women writers: Ferrante and Lahiri.
But let us turn to the novel itself. The title, Ties, is suggestive: it’s a text about the making and breaking of bonds and about the baggage (physical and psychological) accumulated in the process. A cheating husband leaves his wife and children only to return years later to his family. After almost five decades of married life, the couple’s apartment in Rome is ransacked while they are on vacation and the past emerges from the debris of hoarded objects. Thus the past acquires material and spatial form, and husband, wife, and children must reckon with it as they sift through the physical reminders of suppressed traumas. Ties, as the Italian scholar Daniela Brogi writes, is “not simply a novel about marital crisis, it is a text which enacts on its pages the imagined scenarios of failed self-realization upheld by the indestructible pillars of marriage.” Ties, then, is a novel about marriage as an institution and its relationship to self-perception and self-fulfillment, whether through the wife’s meticulous documentation of marital life, through the husband’s selfish pursuit of professional and sexual gratification, or through the children’s witnessing of the dissolution and eventual reconstitution of the family.
Starnone captures and dissects a vast array of concerns in a slim volume, neatly structured and tightly plotted, yet at the same time open-ended, without definitive answers or solutions. Ties, in other words, packs a lot of baggage into a small container while also leaving the container ajar, like Pandora’s box. And the novel, as Jhumpa Lahiri tells us in her passionate, insightful introduction to the text, brims with containers, both literal and symbolic (11). Its narrative form is the outermost container the reader must open, the frame that gives the novel its structure and content. The novel is structured in three parts or books, each with a different narrator. In the first book, the reader watches the collapse of a marriage through the wife’s perspective and, more specifically, through the letters she is writing to her husband.
The novel’s opening line is striking with its clinically concise apostrophe recapitulating the entire history of their marriage up to this moment: “In case it’s slipped your mind, Dear Sir, let me remind you: I am your wife. I know this once pleased you and that now, suddenly, it chafes” (23). Lahiri’s translation conveys the searing pain behind the cold, official tone of the letter. The verb “chafes” astutely captures the wife’s self-perception as a nuisance, an obstacle to her husband’s newly liberated ways. The Italian “ti dà fastidio” is more innocuous, meaning “it bothers you” or “it annoys you,” but Lahiri’s English version is lacerating in its tactile accusation of the husband’s inconstancy. We are instantly bothered and annoyed, chafed, so to speak, by this husband she is addressing. But this communication is a dead end, for we never see the husband’s responses. We do learn, on the first page, that the year is 1974, the couple has been married for twelve years, and that they have two children: Sandro, born in 1965, and Anna, born in 1969. This painstaking accumulation and recounting of facts characterizes the wife’s narrative as well as the severity with which she manages her own life, her children’s, the household—never throwing anything out, saving even shopping lists. The hoarding of baggage—things as well as traumas—becomes symptomatic of this text.
The second part of the novel performs a vertiginous shift in time and space. The narrative jumps to the present day, with the couple now in their seventies, living in a spacious apartment in an upscale neighborhood in Rome. The first-person narrator is Aldo Minori, the husband. We finally learn his wife’s name, Vanda. Unlike Vanda’s brief epistolary appearance, Aldo’s narrative occupies the most textual space and spans the chronology of his marriage. It begins in 2014, with the couple leaving for vacation having made arrangements with Sandro and Anna to take care of the cat. They return to find the apartment in utter disorder: all of their belongings have been turned upside down, destroyed, or else viciously damaged. Nothing is missing except for the cat. Aldo begins to rummage through the debris of his existence to unearth the traces of his successful career and of his stifling, unfulfilling family life. The reader now hears Aldo’s version of the story. It’s a much more comprehensive account, one that even evokes our pity, if not forgiveness, for his cultural crime of abandoning his wife and children for four years, leaving them alone and without financial support in a crime-ridden Naples, while he builds, euphorically, a new life for himself and his young lover in Rome.
That Starnone achieves this trick of soliciting our compassion is evidence of astounding literary craft. For how can we sympathize with a reckless philanderer who refuses to see his wife even after she has tried to commit suicide? And yet we do. Starnone’s technique lies in mining the profound, primal associations of the titular word, “Lacci.” In Italian “lacci” literally means “laces,” but as Lahiri translates in a linguistically brilliant move, it also suggests “ties” or “bonds.” One of the novel’s most memorable and touching scenes involves the literal tying of shoelaces. But the image of being tied socially, emotionally, economically, and psychologically pervades the novel on multiple levels. It is not only the marital bonds that Aldo breaks, he also rebels against the family as an oppressive and repressive institution, replicating the rhetoric of David Cooper’s 1970 study The Death of the Family, translated into Italian in 1972 and thus providing the background for Aldo’s perceived license to cheat. When he eventually returns to his family, Vanda subjects him to subtle psychological warfare in which he acts docile and submissive to the point of masochism. And indeed, it’s the interplay of both husband’s and wife’s sadism and masochism that makes this novel so compelling, that animates the image of laces/ties.
In the third book, Anna takes the floor to recount her and her brother’s tormented childhood—the trauma inflicted by Aldo’s leaving and the even more excruciating trauma of his return. Anna and Sandro reminisce about Vanda’s emotional coldness, her ruthless frugality, her obsessive hoarding of decades-old miscellanea, and her dictatorial reign over the household. If in Vanda’s narrative Aldo acts as a sadist, then Vanda is cast in the role of the masochist who patiently puts up with Aldo’s cruelty. In both Aldo’s and Anna’s narratives, however, Vanda takes on the role of the sadist, a domineering and merciless figure who reduces Aldo to a voiceless, passive pet. Sandro and Anna agree that Aldo “was and remains Mom’s slave” (147).
The third book, the children’s perspective, is in many ways the most shocking, as it narrates the undoing of all ties, the breaking of all established bonds. It is as if Starnone revisits Euripides’s Medea and grants voice to the two children, the innocent victims of Jason’s brutal infidelity and Medea’s wrath. In Euripides’s play, Jason abandons Medea and their two children to marry the princess of Corinth and thus enter a more prosperous and favorable union. Medea, who has herself fled her home to follow Jason and who is a foreigner in Corinth, kills her husband’s new wife and then her own children so that they do not suffer a more painful death. If Ties is Starnone’s retelling of the Medea story, then in the third part we face the narrative of the children condemned to death by their own parents. Sandro and Anna admit to each other that their father’s betrayal, followed by their mother’s sadistic punishment of their father, in effect killed them, damaging their ability to have loving relationships, scarring them for life (142-3). At the end of the novel, the real victims are neither Aldo nor Vanda, who pursue their own petty vengeful schemes, but their children, the silent witnesses of the family’s undoing.
Ties can also be read in the context of another literary work that touches on the sadistic and masochistic impulses in human relationships. I have in mind Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novel Venus in Furs, which proposes an elaborate aesthetics of erotic love through subjection to pain and emotional coldness. The novel’s emotionally cold, cruel heroine is named Wanda (which in German reads Vanda) and she enjoys tying up, literally, her beloved Severin. But beyond the physical bonds, Severin is attached to Wanda through the rhetorical bonds of a written contract that makes him her slave. The master-slave relationship can be said to inform Starnone’s novel as well. Starnone’s Vanda can perhaps be seen as a literary reference to Sacher-Masoch’s Wanda, and Aldo’s unconditional submission to his wife as the enactment of an implicit, unwritten contract between the two. That Vanda wields the ultimate power becomes apparent in both Aldo’s and Anna’s narratives. But does that exonerate Aldo from the cultural crime of leaving his family? A master storyteller, Starnone does not answer, but quietly lifts the lid of Pandora’s box and lets us peek in.
Ties by Domencio Starnone review – a sharply observed tale of a couple in crisis
The novel by Elena Ferrante’s huband follows a similar course to her Days of Abandonment
Domenico Starnone: ‘clever, concise writing’.
Photograph: Alamy
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Anthony Cummins
Sunday 26 March 2017 12.00 BST
Last modified on Wednesday 20 September 2017 10.37 BST
Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment described a wife’s wrath at the husband who leaves her and their two children for a younger woman. Ties lays out a similar scenario from the betrayer’s point of view, which may be no coincidence, given that Domenico Starnone is married to Anita Raja, aka Elena Ferrante (allegedly). Clever, concise and astringent, it swiftly dispels any suspicion that the pair ought to just get a room or that their publisher risks bleeding the Ferrante craze dry. The narrator, an ex-screenwriter from Naples, has cause to revisit his desertion after an apparent break-in at the Rome flat he shares with his wife, the two uneasily reconciled in late age after his reckless midlife pursuit of sexual and professional desire in the 1970s. Translated at Starnone’s invitation by the US novelist Jhumpa Lahiri – a Ferrante favourite – the story glints and cuts like smashed crystal.
• Ties by Domenico Starnone is published by Europa (£9.99). To order a copy for £8.49 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846
‘First Execution’ by Domenico Starnone
Fiction – paperback; Europa Editions; 173 pages; 2009. Translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar.
Domenico Starnone is an Italian writer, rumoured, at one stage, as being Elena Ferrante, the writer of the Neapolitan series of four novels — My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave And Those Who Stay and The Story of the Lost Child — whose identity has remained secret. Having read My Brilliant Friend (yet to be reviewed) I can see how that theory might have come about.
Starnone’s novel, First Execution, posits the idea that education shapes our world view, just as Ferrante does in My Brilliant Friend. He also depicts a relatively violent world, where emotional restraint is in short supply, one that is deeply divided between the rich and the poor. This is something Ferrante does, too. Are they one and the same author? Who knows? To be honest, it doesn’t matter.
The Execution is a brilliant novel brimful of ideas and theories about politics, education, terrorism, war and justice — among others — and I came away from it feeling as if my mind was slightly blown. This is a good thing.
Mild-mannered man caught up in bigger events
The book opens with a retired teacher, 67-year-old Domenico Stasi (note the similarity to the author’s own name) finding out that Nina, a former pupil, has been charged with “armed conspiracy”. Stasi, who taught his students to fight for what they believed in, feels partially responsible — did he contribute to Nina’s desire to become a terrorist?
To appease his own sense of (misguided) guilt, he visits her — they have coffee together in a cafe — but then finds himself caught up in Nina’s world:
She asked me to go to the apartment of a friend of hers. The apartment had been empty for some time, her friend was overseas, she handed me the keys. On the bookshelves in the living room I would find a copy of The Death of Virgil, by Hermann Broch. On page 46 a few words had been underlined. I was to transcribe those words and place the sheet of paper in an envelope. Soon, someone would show up and ask for the envelope. That was all.
This puts Stasi in a difficult position: should he do it, or say no? Of course, it wouldn’t be much of a story if he declined, but the narrative that unfurls from this one decision is quite unexpected, for the author inserts himself into the story — Paul Auster style — and we learn how he struggles to write the very pages we are reading. It’s slightly disconcerting and disorienting to suddenly have Domenico Starnone tell us about his creation Domenico Stasi, but it’s a clever device for exploring the lines between fiction and reality and how the two can sometimes mix.
As the narrative slips backwards and forward between the two voices of the two Domenicos — sometimes this is seamless, at other times it’s quite a jolt — we are taken on an electrifying ride that feels like a psychological thriller on one level and a deeply philosophical mediation about the state of the world on another. Indeed, it’s a weird kind of page turner in the sense that you want to find out what happens next — will Domenico get himself arrested or badly hurt or perhaps even killed? — but at the same time you’re forced to contemplate all kinds of issues, including war, violence, capitalism, socialism, religion, education, what it is to get old and the lines between guilt and innocence.
Personal responsibility
A constant refrain is to what extent we bear personality responsibility for the state of the society we live in. If we are unhappy about the divide between the rich and the poor, or the injustices that go on around us, do we become complicit if we do nothing about the situation? And if we do decide to do something, is it ever okay to be violent, to rise up against the powers that be and perhaps take innocent people’s lives to make a point?
Stasi, in particular, often muses about the need to make a decision, because indifference simply breeds more problems down the line — in other words, the past always catches up with the future.
I spent a lot of time underlining lengthy paragraphs in this book because they so eloquently captured my own thoughts about justice and poverty, for instance, and I came away from this rather clever novel feeling a slightly richer person for having read it.
Finally, I should add that if you liked Laurent Binet’s HHhH, then you may well enjoy this one too.
"First Execution"
(Reviewed by Mary Whipple MAR 4, 2009)
“The guilty—he had always believed—are those who exploit, plunder, starve, devastate, exterminate, and poison. Those who simply react to crimes against humanity are guiltless, even if they shed a great deal of blood. Blood does not stain the just man. It may provoke horror, but shedding that blood is in some cases necessary.”
Fans of metafiction will get a real workout with this novel by Domenico Starnone, who in 2001 was honored with the Strega Prize, Italy’s most prestigious literary prize. First Execution, a book which appears to be about terrorism and the shedding of blood by all extremist groups--from fascists to communists to, more recently, religious extremists—is, like all metafiction, a novel in which reality and fantasy overlap. A narrator/author, Domenico Stasi, is writing a story which he plans to submit as part of a collection of stories which will be sold to raise money for tsunami relief. As he writes, he tells about events from his own life while adapting these events to the needs of his fiction, telling his story and then backing up and rewriting his memories and his plot, while also experimenting with characters. The reality of his life is the starting point for the fantasy he is creating, but by the time the book ends, the reader’s perception of reality has been so distorted by Stasi’s creative process that the “real-life” conclusion feels more like fantasy than reality. The effect is akin to witnessing to an act of violence—one is not sure whether to believe what the eyes are seeing.
Stasi, a sixty-seven-year-old former high school teacher, has always been on the cutting edge of progressive, radical ideas, moving in the course of his life and teaching career from promoting Christian charity to communism, to the anti-Vietnam war movement, to, ultimately, world revolution. Respected as a teacher, he has always been seen by his students as “capable of showing the injustice in just about everything,” and they (and he himself) believe that his “radical beliefs had always been…a form of mental honesty.” He has told them that “You should die on your feet, rather than live on your knees.” Despite this brave statement, however, he is unsure of who he really is, declaring that “I had grown old doing not what I wanted to do, but rather what corresponded to the way I saw myself.”
When Antonia Villa, known as Nina, one of his former students, is released from jail after an investigation for armed conspiracy, her father contacts Stasi to set up a meeting, at which Nina asks Stasi to go to an apartment, copy a passage from a book there, and then put it into an envelope which someone will later retrieve. He is not sure why he agrees to do this, since he believes Nina is a member of the revolutionary Red Brigades, but he wanted “to live up to her expectations,” the memories of him that she has carried for the ten years since she finished school. There are times, he believes, “when a person of any sensibility must sell his cloak and purchase a sword.” Later he agrees to return to the apartment where he has found the book, and this time he finds a package addressed to him containing a pistol and the photograph of a man whom he is presumably expected to execute.
While he is doing the bidding of Nina and her associates, he is also contacted by Augusto Sellitto, another former student, who has taken a different route. Sellitto is a police officer who warns him against Nina, telling him that “those streets you cross with your eyes closed could be dangerous.”
Throughout the novel, Stasi the author/teacher and Stasi the character in the story explore their philosophical worlds. Stasi the author continuously changes the story and its details, adding information from his past life, erasing ideas that he believes do not work in his fictional story, explaining how his political ideals have changed, and trying to live his own real life at the same time that he is creating a new, and much revised, fictional life. Stasi the character in the story explores dreams and examines symbols—eels with their heads chopped off which disappear inside a house, a chicken which Stasi must kill to save face. Ultimately, Stasi the real man, always wanting to defend the oppressed, becomes infuriated with the insulting behavior of a man on a bus toward a woman, attacking and then throwing him off the bus. The man’s family later blames him for the man’s declining health—and become part of the fictional story.
As the story becomes increasingly complex—and more philosophically absurdist--Stasi the man decides that “everyone, eventually, will be forced to decide not whether to shed blood, but which blood to shed: the blood of the oppressed or the blood of the oppressors.” And even though he begins to wonder if Nina and her friends are playing him for a fool as they continue to send him on errands and set him up to execute someone, he decides that he no longer has “feelings of indignation.” Eventually, Stasi the man and Stasi the fictional character merge in a grand climax at the conclusion, bringing Stasi’s reality and fantasy together to create a new “reality.” He no longer thinks of the future, believing that “What’s wonderful…is to understand that this life of ours is what exists, here, now, and nothing more,” a statement which proves to be a consummate irony.
Readers who enjoy metafiction will enjoy the novel’s twists and turns into and out of reality and the author’s exploration of political thought and action in the twentieth century. The story itself is by turns exciting, absurd, and ironic. Readers who prefer more straightforward novels, however, may find themselves frustrated with the artificiality of the construction and the fact that most of the “action” seems to take place in the fictional story. The book’s dramatic conclusion, in which Starnone leaves the reader to fill in the blanks regarding what will happen next, continues his dark, if not cynical, tone, hammering home the idea that “Maybe the human race never had any hope at all, right from the beginning.” (Translated by Antony Shugaar.)
Domenico Starnone’s First Execution
by Andrew Lawless
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Writers and the Credit Crunch – Margaret Atwood and Tim Parks
American Gothic – Josh Ritter brings his brand of Americana to Europe
Orhan Pamuk and the Museum of Innocence
Domenico Starnone’s First Execution
It seems like a good year and a half since I’ve read a novel that didn’t involve a writer writing a novel, so I started Domenico Starnone’s First Execution wearily, almost out of duty – despite the fact that the original Italian version of the book comes highly recommended.
It has though, thus far (I’m half way through) been a literary pick-me-up, reminding the reader that there are concrete reasons sometimes for authors to play around with post-modern trickery,
The story opens with an ageing Italian professor, Domenico Stasi, meeting with one of his favourite former students – a young woman who has just been released from prison after involvement with a left-wing terrorist movement. Stasi, who has his whole life lectured on morality, power, and class struggle is faced with a dilemma when his student, Nina, asks him to move from theory into action, by performing a simple message delivery for the movement.
Things are further complicated when, having agreed, he’s brought in for police questioning – at the hands of another former student, one who has taken, it seems, the opposite political path.
And in that nutshell you have an interesting story that could tell you a huge amount about Italy’s anni di piombo, or years of lead as the violent period between the end of the 1960s and the start of the 1980s has become known. It is, in many ways, still a fresh subject for Italian writers, artists, and film-makers given that so many of the incidents remain shrouded in mystery (like the kidnapping and assasination of former prime-minister Aldo Moro, for example).
But instead Starnone, after setting up an effective narrative full of suspense, steps into the ring interrupting things to talk about his narrative choices. For example, after dropping a bombshell in the opening chapters, suggesting that our Professor’s wife may have had an affair, Starnone breaks in:
I wanted to just leave that phrase lying there, artlessly, dangling without any immediate development. But it should burn into the eye of the careful reader.
(I rummage through my notes: “Nothing more than a glancing reference. Carla, Luciano. The opacity behind which Stasi sought safety.” When I write a story – during the actual writing – I jot down ideas or characters that pop into my mind, even though the time hasn’t come to use them: hypotheses about the nature of my characters, significant actions that this one or that one will perform either just a few lines down, or else further along, or perhaps at the end of the book, concepts that will serve to generate thoughts or dialogues. This material generally lies there unused, often I don’t even look at it again, it’s a memo that I almost never make use of. Recently, though, I decided to go through a number of stories that I sketched out over the years, including this story of Professor Stasi, for instance, and I pulled out the notebook with those notes. At first I planned to complete the stories that I still found interesting and that I had left unfinished or incomplete. But then, suddenly, I changed my mind. It struck me that I could do something else: make use of my notes, my first drafts, and passages that I had polished to provide a faithful, reliable account of the drafting of each of the stories. A first draft is the closest thing there is to life itself as it rains chaotically down upon our heads. Why not give it a try? And so, here I am now, trying to stitch together what I had imagined for Carla and Luciano. For Luciano, though, I have to remember to change his name. Make a note, in case I actually publisht this. I can’t leave him with the name of a colleague that I actually knew decades ago, even though a real name is particularly comfortable for a writer, while it’s just depressing to give false names to a friend, and acquaintance, a neighbour: Lucio or Luc or Z. or even Comrade ***. The impression of authenticity, of truth, begins to fade. Luciano was like this or like that, he used to do this or that; now who is this Lucio, who is Luc, who is Z., who is Comrade ***. Useless filters in a word that is so permanently fake that it no longer requires filters.)
Look at the length of that parentheses – he even breaks the flow of his own interruptions. This should, you might think, make for a fragmented and unsatisfactory read, but in fact the opposite is the case. The plot within the plot is enough to get us page-turning, but the interruptions when they come are not mere sleights of hand. They are the real story, and tell us as much or more about Italy’s recent history than the dozens of straight narratives tthat have been published/filmed.
By chance, I came upon an interview between American novelist John Wray (whose latest novel Lowboy will be reviewed shortly in TMO) and Austrian film-maker Michael Haneke, which puts its finger on why this distancing approach is both necessary and worthwhile:
Haneke has his own theory for the divergent routes taken by Hollywood and Europe, one in which, perhaps not surprisingly, the darker side of German and Austrian history plays a central role. “At the beginning of the 20th century,” he told me, “when film began in Europe, storytelling of the kind still popular in Hollywood was every bit as popular here. Then the Nazis came, and the intellectuals — a great number of whom were Jewish — were either murdered or managed to escape to America and elsewhere. There were no intellectuals anymore — most of them were dead. Those who escaped to America were able to continue the storytelling approach to film — really a 19th-century tradition — with a clear conscience, since it hadn’t been tainted by fascism. But in the German-speaking world, and in most of the rest of Europe, that type of straightforward storytelling, which the Nazis had made such good use of, came to be viewed with distrust. The danger hidden in storytelling became clear — how easy it was to manipulate the crowd. As a result, film, and especially literature, began to examine itself. Storytelling, with all the tricks and ruses it requires, became gradually suspect. This was not the case in Hollywood.” At this point, Haneke asked politely whether I was following him, and I told him that I was. “I’m glad,” he said, apparently with genuine relief. “For Americans, this can sometimes be hard to accept.”
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Roots of terror: Domenico Starnone's First Execution
The books being published by Europa editions are seductive enough as book-objects that they hardly need the highest quality of writing and translation--but they have that too. The books are often less than 200 pages, printed with an untrimmed edge, and in a tall, elegant format with gorgeous paperback covers. They have published a number of excellent crime novels in translation, by Massimo Carlotto, Alicia Gimenez-Bartlett, Jean-Claude Izzo, and Carlo Lucarelli, among others, alongside first-rate contemporary fiction that would otherwise not be available in English. First Execution, by Domenico Starnone and translated by Antony Shugaar, could fit in either category. It's about the roots of violent revolutionary ideology in post-War Italy, and includes crimes of various sorts (seen and implied) including assault and assasination. But it's told in a two-part (really four-part) metafictional style that is always lucid and entertaining. We meet a retired professor, Domenico Stasi, who has been approached by a former female student, Nina Villa, who has been accused of complicity with a revived Red Brigades terrorist group. Nina asks Stasi to perform an errand that seems to be related to her terrorist connections. Then we meet (spoiler alert) the writer who is trying to write the story of Stasi and struggling with his material. So there is Stasi's first-person narrative, a third-person narrative about Stasi, and twin first-person narratives by the writer about the text and about incidents in his own life (and actually there is yet another thread at the end (several of which become intertwined with the tale of Stasi). But don't be put off by the complexity: Starnone is in perfect control, and the reader moves seamlessly from one thread of the story into another with no confusion. The writing is gorgeous: one passage as a simple example, when a man is assaulted and tries to run away from his assailant: "he was gathering himself together--collecting himself--with all his strength and then splintering himself away heavily, now a leg, now an arm, now the head. It was a weird, off-kilter flight: he hastened away, but uncomfortably, uneasily." That passage could be from a Futurist classic or from Carlo Emilio Gadda's famously complex detective story, That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, a masterpiece of Modernist Italian fiction. There's also a bit of Luigi Pirandello and a bit of Italo Svevo in Starnone's style. But Starnone's prose remains, for all its flash, disarmingly direct, never difficult. Through Stasi's meditations on what he has taught his students, on his own motivations and convictions, and on the options for direct action that he now confronts we delve deeply into the distinctive left-wing politics of the "old Europe" and on the distinctive brand of violent opposition also appearing therein. The voices in the novel give us the whole pattern of Italian politics, the division of rich and poor, the frustration and the temptation toward violent resistance, the corruption and organized crime, the unemployment that confronts university graduates, and the global situation of the 21st century, in a fast-moving, lively, interwoven story. Starnone doesn't come to a resolution of the philosophical and political conundrums that he raises: instead he gives us a view of the realities and motives underlying Italian politics, giving no one a free ride in his cold-blooded (or perhaps hard-boiled) depiction. Starnone portrays the philosophical underpinnings for the host of novels and films depicting politics in modern Italy--and he does it in with entertaining, Postmodern panache.
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