By Times Literary Supplement | Created at 2025-01-22 14:58:05 | Updated at 2025-01-30 05:21:30
1 week ago
Like much of Domenico Starnone’s fiction, this short novel is set in the author’s native Naples. It begins in 1952, when the narrator, Mimí, is eight, unhappy and obsessed with two things: the girl on the balcony opposite and the underworld. That’s where he would like her to descend, so he can play Orpheus to her Eurydice. Only one part of this fantasy comes true.
Mimí’s guide to “matters of Love and Death” is his grandmother. She tells him various tales, speaking in Neapolitan dialect, while he is learning proper Italian, the better to impress both the girl and the rest of the world. Mimí is embarrassed of Nonna’s uneducated ways and inelegant looks, yet he knows that no other adult understands or loves him as she does. The most memorable of the old woman’s stories is that of her own life, illustrated by a photograph of her and her husband, the only one ever taken of them. Looking at the young couple, Mimí is smitten by the beauty his grandmother once possessed.
When the girl from Milan disappears, Mimí is heartbroken, but then adolescence takes its course. He writes poetry and fiction, choosing Dante as his model. “I must improve my vocabulary”, he decides, “and most of all, I have to start coming up with uncommonly good literary ideas”. Another few years later, he goes to university to study papyrology and glottology. He is, however, “more interested in language generally … in the way most of the flowers of the voice blossom in the air only to wither without ever getting transcribed”. For his dissertation he phonetically records his grandmother’s speech. Believing the world of academia to be the opposite of the underworld – a kind of paradise that has no place for her – she is reluctant to participate in the project, but once she has started, words pour out of her. No longer a source of embarrassment, dialect forms a bridge to the past.
Full of Neapolitan words and phrases, this is a tricky book to translate. Oonagh Stransky’s solution – to preserve some of the dialect intrusions, either glossing or leaving them as they are (“vafanculostrunznunmeromperpcàzz”, for example, needs no explanation in context) – raises some questions but mostly works well.
The boy who doesn’t want to grow up, Mimí (short for Domenico) is a familiar figure. Like the narrator of Michele Mari’s Verdigris (2024), he looks back at his younger self – “the boy I was then and the elderly man I am today share several commonalities” – remembering, or misremembering, the past. When it transpires that most things he thought he knew about the object of his childhood desire were not what they appeared to be, he becomes convinced that his future is in writing. Memory cannot be trusted; stories told in books are true to life.
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