Domenico Starnone’s novel The House on Via Gemito is a work of “autofiction” based on the author’s childhood and adolescence in a working-class family in Naples in the 1950s and ’60s. The narrator (Mimí) explores his fraught relationship with his father Federí– a railway clerk who has dreams of becoming an artist. Federí is extremely charismatic but at the same time bitter and resentful. He blames his lack of artistic success on the fact that, in order to support his family, he has to work an unfulfilling job in the railways. He also believes that other artists and critics are jealous of him and conspiring to ruin his career.
One of the novel’s main themes is the fraught–and often abusive– nature of the relationship between Federí and his wife Rusinè. Federí is extremely possessive of his wife and often accuses her of being unfaithful to him. This ties in to his general suspicion of women’s sexuality. At the same time, he is extremely proud of his own success with women. As the novel begins, Mimí is trying to remember all the times that Federí abused Rusinè. His father insists that in all their years of marriage, he only hit his wife once. Mimí doesn’t believe him and this leads into a long section where he remembers fights between his parents, which in part revolve around his father criticizing his mother’s alleged vanity. Mimí also blames his father for neglecting his mother’s complaints about her health, which lead to her death at a relatively young age from a liver condition that would have been treatable if addressed at the right time.
Another major theme of the novel is the process of making art. The second section of the book “The Boy Pouring Water” revolves around the period when Mimí posed for his father while he was in the process of painting his famous large scale work The Drinkers (a reproduction of which is used for the book cover). Starnone describes the tedious process of posing and the difficulty of having to hold the same position for a length of time. Mimí is determined to impress his father, who often complains that his other models are unable to stay still. He describes the process by which the artist makes order out of chaos–which is akin to how he turns his random memories into a coherent book. This section also includes the grown up narrator walking around Naples and trying to find his father’s paintings, which are hanging ignored in various municipal offices.
Readers of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet will notice many similarities between those novels and Via Gemito. This is particularly noteworthy when it comes to the dynamics of working-class families and the often abusive nature of relationships between men and women. Though these similarities could be coincidental since both authors are writing about the same time period and social milieu, several scholars have used computer analysis to determine that Starnone’s and Ferrante’s works match each other extremely closely. This has led them to theorize that Starnone (perhaps in collaboration with his wife Anita Raja) is the author behind the pseudonym Elena Ferrante. They hypothesize that when Starnone wants to write from a female perspective, he assumes the identity of Ferrante. However, Ferrante has claimed that the fact that Italians believe that she is really a man reflects the misogyny of the publishing industry.
Finally, credit must be given to translator Oonagh Stransky who has brought the novel into English (more than two decades after its Italian publication). Particularly noteworthy is her decision to leave many of Federí’s profanities in the Neapolitan dialect, allowing English-speaking readers to get a sense of the way he talks.
In conclusion, I would highly recommend The House on Via Gemito to those who are interested in Italian literature and who are fans of Elena Ferrante’s works. Those interested in art and artists will particularly appreciate the novel.
Thoughts Of A Bibliophile 