Domenico Starnone

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The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone (Italy) tr. Oonagh Stransky

That was quite an experience.

Starnone writes a work of fiction about the man his father was (we can assume it is autobiographical since his father’s name was Federico and he painted an artwork titled ‘The Drinkers’ which is in part featured on the cover). It is an attempt to tell the story of a man he spent his childhood in fear of and his adulthood trying not to be like.

Reconstructing a Life, Walking the Streets

In the novel, the narrator is the eldest son Mimi, who lives in Rome but has returned to Naples some time after the death of his father and is reconstructing memories, by walking the streets where they lived, visiting certain places to evoke other memories, like the hospital where his mother was when her husband could no longer deny her illness; the church where he made his first communion; the council offices, where he hopes to find some of his father’s paintings, including ‘The Drinkers’. Every location existed in service to his father’s existence and memories.

He was certain that both great and small events had a common thread: the mystery of his destiny. And he constantly tried to prove it to himself, his relatives, his friends, and to us children by weaving a vibrant pattern in which the only events that were true were the ones vitally connected to him. Consequently, all the names of cities and buildings and roads, all of geography, served merely to create a map of his needs, and this was how they were to be remembered.

Though the novel is about the man, the title refers to a street where they lived for a while and the use of street names rather than diary entries or even artworks, inscribes the neighbourhood into history, creating a different kind of legacy, one that will last longer than any man or work of art. A diary would be too intimate, a street map a kind of canvas.

Portrait of a Narcissist Father Via His Eldest Son

It is also about his own boyhood, however the character of the father overshadows the son, his wife, his wife’s family, in fact anyone in proximity to him. This is because he considers himself superior. According to himself. He makes it one of his main purposes in life to remind everyone around him of that fact. He can not be taken down or made to think he is anything less than how he perceives himself.

It’s true, he was lazy. He was arrogant. He was blowhard. He was all those things, and the first to admit it. He felt he had the right to be lazy, arrogant, and a blowhard – to anyone who busted his balls. He was born to be a painter, not a railroader.

The son walks familiar streets of Naples, streets he never strolled with his father – but knew intimately from his adolescence – as a way to navigate anecdotes about the way his father lived his life, the things he said (mostly insults about everyone else), the things he did (working for the railroad as a clerk, beating his wife, painting artworks) and his opinions about various matters. He walks and remembers. He walks and imagines anew.

A Determined Artist Perseveres

historical fiction Paris 1939 Domenico Starnone House on via gemito
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Federi is passionate about art and believes he possesses great artistic talent, but the art world is full of shit people who nominate their friends for prizes, then their friends create prizes and nominate those friends, therefore keeping him out of these circles. He blames everyone for his lack of success that he continues to strive for. Beginning with his own father who refused to educate him, in fact his parents abandoned him at a young age and sent him to live with his grandmother.

He becomes a working class man, who sees the most beautiful woman who he takes for a wife, raises four sons and a daughter and spends his free time at home painting or pursuing opportunities to advance his art.

A Literary Triptych

The book is in three sections. The first section ‘The Peacock’ introduces the character and is the part of the book where you might abandon, because it isn’t yet clear why it might benefit any reader to be subject to this psychological demonstration of one of the most extreme versions of the societal system of domination at work. The patriarchy thrives under this system, as Riane Eisler showed in her work The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future and Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future and the portrait this novel creates shows how someone who lives according to this conditioning impacts those in his proximity. Cycles of trauma, neglect and narcissism eroding relationships in pursuit of validation, not love.

A Masterpiece Created at All Cost

Much of the source material is inspired by journals his father kept, which trigger memories and dates of events he participated in. The artworks themselves are a kind of journal, a record of themes in his life. Part Two ‘The Boy Pouring Water’ is the most compelling and significant section, it documents the process of creating the largest, most significant art work he would do. ‘The Drinkers’ required the son to pose as the boy pouring water, other members of the family sat for him and the local fruit and vegetable seller.

The anxiety the young son would feel when he realises that there is a problem in the image, between the character holding out the glass and where he is pouring from will cause contortions of magnitude in him, to try and avoid the disaster he sees coming. His father never sees it and we think for a moment that the drama has been averted, alas no – disaster arrives at the height of his short-lived pleasure.

So why do we want to read a novel about an egomaniac? And one that was originally published just over 20 years ago.

It is both a psychological example of the effect a man with no empathy and worse, a need to belittle, insult and induce fear in people, can have on a family. It is set against a backdrop of 1960’s Naples, post WWII, a place where allegiances often changed, both in the halls of power and on the street, depending on how ‘enemies or allies’ treated the people.

It is the historical context and the journey of a working class man trying to break into the establishment of artists, who despite his unruly personality, perseveres and participates as much as is possible for someone who won’t allow himself to be intimidated. Everything is a struggle, he will fight to the end. Art ‘wasn’t fun, it was war’.

Fortunately as the years passed, I developed a strategy for blocking out his words. Using this technique, which I perfected as a teenager, the angrier he grew when telling the stories of his life and the reasons for his actions, the thicker the fog grew in my head, allowing me to think about other things. It helped establish a distance between us. It curbed the desire to kill him.

Fatherhood in Another Era, Produce, Punish, Protect

In the final part ‘The Dancer’ the humiliation of the son comes full circle as he enters adolescence and tries to impress a girl Nunzia and his father gives him terrible advice about what to do with women. As if things couldn’t get any worse, we learn that young girl has been abused by an Uncle and the son lies waiting for his fathers verdict.

The book ends with a scene that makes the reader pause to reflect on how reliable the narrator is, like the father, he too has the ability to exaggerate, to curate anecdotes and perspective.

Once I got into this, which didn’t take very long, I found it both shocking and compelling to read, the dedication by a son to honoring the passage of a man who made his boyhood hell. Thus he provides a kind of validation beyond the grave, but doesn’t hold back from focusing on the many flaws alongside the talent. It is the many layers that make it something of a classic, the psychological profile and repeat patterns of the man, the making of an artist and the impact on family and the social history of a city.

Highly Recommended.

‘The House on Via Gemito is a marvellous novel of Naples and its environs during and after the Second World War. The prism for this exploration is the relationship between the narrator and his railway worker / artist father – an impossible man, filled with cowardice and boastfulness. His son’s attempt to understand and forgive him is compelling; we are held through the minutiae of each argument and explosion, each hope and almost-success.’ International Booker Judges

Further Reading

New York Times Review June 2023: My Father The Frustrated Artist

A Reading Guide – The House on Via Gemito, International Booker Prize 2024

Read An Extract from the Opening Chapter here

To see the artwork of Federico Starnone visit https://starnone.it/gallery2/

Author, Domenico Starnone

About the author

Domenico Starnone is an Italian writer, screenwriter and journalist. He was born in Naples and lives in Rome

He is the author of 13 works of fiction, including First Execution, Ties, a New York Times Editors Pick and Notable Book of the Year, and a Sunday Times and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year, Trick, a Finalist for the 2018 National Book Award and the 2019 PEN Translation Prize, and Trust. 

The House on Via Gemito won Italy’s most prestigious literary prize, the Strega in 2001 and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2024.

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Ties by Domenico Starnone (Italy) tr. Jhumpa Lahiri

Ties is a novel about the short and long-term effect of the first grand infidelity, on a couple, on their adult children and even on the life of their cat.

As I began to read, I had a strange feeling of deja vu, or should I say deja lu, the voice of the woman who writes the letters in the opening chapters isn’t the same, but the premise of her abandonment, being left with two children, it’s as if this novel reignited elements of how I imagined Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment, which I read last summer.

I found myself back there, in the same apartment, experiencing the same circumstances, only these were not the reflections of the same woman, nor of the same writer – well no – this is a man writing these letters from a woman (Vanda) and then in a voice that rings more true, that of the man (Aldo) who abandons, who wanted to suspend the life he found himself in, in pursuit of something that claimed nothing more than pleasure from him.

In Ferrante’s devastating, gripping novel, the voice of the wife takes hold of the reader from the outset, she is calm and rational, appearing reasonable on the outside, all the while anger and rage builds inside her like a furnace. We enter the narrative in this safe space, then feel it slowly disintegrate as that raging inferno can no longer be contained and erupts, spilling hazardously into reality.

In contrast Starnone’s protagonist Vanda, through excerpts from a few of the letters she wrote Aldo, that he rereads  40 years after they were written, is angry, opinionated and doesn’t hold back from sharing any of the catastrophic thoughts that come to her, about the damage he has done and is doing to her and the children.

The narrative structure is interesting, as the story is set around the departure and return of Vanda and Aldo from a holiday at the sea. They are in their 70’s and for the week they will be away, they’ve asked their adult children, who no longer speak to each other, to feed the cat.

The three parts of the novel encompass, book one, the letters Vanda wrote when her husband left her, book two, the departure for the holiday and the return narrated by Aldo, within which he deconstructs the marriage and his part in it. The return to their apartment and the circumstance they find themselves in, evoking in him a long period of contemplation, going over events, memories and perceptions as he tries to understand how it all came to this.

I held back. In general, faced with difficult situations, I slow down; I try to avoid making the wrong moves. She, on the other hand, after a moment of bewilderment, dives headfirst into terror, fighting it with everything she’s got. She’s always behaved this way, ever since I’ve known her, and it was what she did now.

There is one scene where Aldo discovers an old photo of Vanda and it is as if he sees her for the first time, he sees something of the essence of her in youth, and now fifty years later, has a partial realisation of what he has lost, of what he has failed to see, and by doing so, has extinguished in her.

I recognised the features of that period: flimsy clothes she sewed herself, scuffed shoes with worn-out heels, no make-up on her large eyes. What I didn’t recognise on the other hand, was her youth. This, then, was what was alien to me: her youth. In those pictures Vanda radiated a glow which – I discovered – I had no recollection of, not even a spark that allowed me to say: Yes she used to be like this.

And book three, narrated by the daughter Anna, on one of the alternate days she has agreed to feed the cat, convincing her brother who she hasn’t seen since he was favoured in her Aunt’s will years ago, to meet her there.

The novel is called Ties, a translation of Lacci or laces, which has a double meaning in Italian, meaning both the cords that we use to tie shoes and the connections or bonds between people and or things, a metaphor for the ties that continue to bind despite separation, distance, change, age. There are attempts to let go, by all the characters, attempts to distance, to free themselves of the bonds that tie, but none that really succeed. In some, the attempt to separate will result in the creation of new and more numerous ties, the son Sandro moves from one relationship to another, each resulting in another child.

It’s an intriguing novel, with what I felt was a slightly bizarre and unexpected ending. The story invoked immediate comparisons with The Days of Abandonment, however the experience of reading this novel was like viewing these lives from the outside, like looking at things from a distance, provoking a more questioning response, whereas Ferrante’s novel succeeds in transporting the reader into the narrative, it’s more cathartic and slightly terrifying, as she brings you to the edge of sanity, making you sense the danger in letting that temporary instability be observed by the outside world, a situation that many women in past centuries were indeed committed to asylums for, provoked as they often were by the cool, insensitive abandonment of the patriarch.

P.S. After reading the novel and writing the review, I’ve since seen a couple of articles that speculate 1), that Domenico Starnone might be Elena Ferrante (I don’t think so) and 2), that he may be married to the woman who uses the pseudonym, Elena Ferrante. Whether or not the latter is true, there is indeed a link between the two novels, the literary comparison of more interest than the pursuit of the personal lives of authors who wish to remain anonymous and separate from their work.

Note: Thank you to the publisher Europa Editions, for providing me with a copy of Ties.