“Trick” by Domenico Starnone (translated by Jhumpa Lahiri)

This short novel is narrated by an Italian widower finagled by his daughter into traveling back to his old home in Naples to babysit his grandson. The old man is a once famous artist who now keeps busy illustrating books. As the novel progresses one can sense the narrator has not aged well. He is now unconfident in both his art and his life. “For a few moments I felt like an insignificant part of a long process of disintegration, a scale soon destined to join the organic and inorganic matter solidifying since the Paleozoic era on the ground and at the bottom of the sea.” Snooping through his dead wife’s papers, he found that she had been cuckolding him for years. The narrator moves about gingerly, as if each new step could spell disaster. He is old and proud, yet he knows that time has passed him by. “Fashions, I thought, sadly, wear out, leaving behind the futile traces of those who upheld them.” His grandson gives him all he can handle. He is rambunctious, bordering on bratty. Yet, in time, the narrator almost seems to crave the four-year-old’s approval. The grandson becomes both his rival and his glimpse to a path not taken. Starnone is at his best when he describes the specificity of Naples in detail. The narrator can still speak in dialect, but it almost seems false to him. “But the Neopolitan that was spoken in Vasto, at the Pendino, at the Market— the neighborhoods where I was raised, and before that my father and grandparents and great-grandparents, maybe all my ancestors put together—didn’t know the word ire, the wrath of Achilles and others who lived in books. They only knew ‘a raggia, rage.” Instead of becoming a street tough or a degenerate gambler like his father, he has become an effeminate artist. But he still has a part of the old city within him. This is a story about an old man trying to come to terms with the importance of his legacy and the futility of his remaining days.

“Ties” by Domenico Starnone (translated by Jhumpa Lahiri)

This short novel was translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri. It is the story of a dysfunctional family, told by three narrators. The story begins with the revelation of an affair that ruins a marriage and a family. The superficial “tie” in the story is the unusual way the father has taught his son to tie his shoelaces. The subconscious ties that run throughout the book, however, are the ties that bond and break a family- the promises that you make and sometimes fail to keep when you start on the project of creating a family unit. The novel deals with conjugal love, parental love, filial love, and sibling love. Scars and resentments build, old secrets surface, and revenge is sought and found. The story is tightly written. You can feel the pain and emotion building as more and more is revealed. The author is supposedly the husband of Elena Ferrante. Although it takes place in Naples and Rome, it is more a story of the human condition than a distinctly Italian tale. It a story of love lost, sacrifices made, and family bonds that can be strained, but never broken, for better or for worse.