Review: The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone

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.

Review: Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults

As a fan of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, I eagerly looked forward to reading her most recent  novel The Lying Life of Adults (Europa Editions, 2020).

Like the Quartet,  The Lying Life Of Adults is set in Naples and contrasts different parts of the city– Rione Alto (where the heroine Giovanna resides) and Pascone, the working-class area where her father came from and where his estranged sister, Vittoria, still lives.  Unlike the Quartet’s Lenu, who started in poverty and rose to an upper-middle class lifestyle, Giovanna must make this journey in reverse in order to find out the truth about her Aunt Vittoria.  Much of the novel’s conflict stems from the divide between the bourgeois lifestyle Giovanna’s  parents– professors and writers– have created versus the working-class existence of Vittoria, who dropped out of school and works as a cleaning lady in the houses of the rich.

The novel’s opening paragraph sets up the narrative extremely well and is worth quoting in full:

Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly. The sentence was uttered under his breath, in the apartment that my parents, newly married, had bought at the top of Via San Giacomo dei Capri, in Rione Alto. Everything–the spaces of Naples, the blue light of a frigid February, those words–remained fixed. But I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within these lines that are intended to give me a story, while in fact I am nothing, nothing of my own, nothing that has really begun or really been brought to completion: only a tangled knot and nobody, not even the one who at this moment is writing, knows if it contains the right thread for a story or is merely a snarled confusion of suffering without redemption (Ferrante 10).

This opening immediately incites the main plot. Her father’s declaration that she is ugly (specifically that she is “getting the face of Vittoria”) spurs Giovanna to meet her aunt, whom she has never seen because of the estrangement between the siblings.  The opening sentences also establish the importance of geography– the family lives in the upper-middle class neighborhood of Rione Alto, where the parents own property.  Finally, it establishes that (like the Quartet) the novel is told from a retrospective first-person perspective. At some undetermined point in the future, Giovanna is looking back on the events of the two year period between ages thirteen and fifteen.

Review: Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels

This review was originally published in Pakistan Today on September 28 2020

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels — My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child — tell the story of two friends, Elena Greco (Lenu) and Raffaella Cerullo (Lina), from their childhood until their sixties. Though divided into four books, Ferrante has said that she considers the quartet to be one novel since it tells one continuous story.

The quartet opens in the present time (circa 2010) when Lenu — a famous writer living in Turin — receives a phone call from Lina’s son telling her that his mother has disappeared. She has left nothing behind and has even cut her face out of any photographs in which she appeared. Lenu realizes that Lila has finally put her plan to completely erase herself into action. She then proceeds to write the story of their relationship. The novel we are reading is thus narrated in the first person, from Lenu’s perspective.

Lenu and Lila grow up in an impoverished neighborhood of Naples soon after World War II.  Lenu is the daughter of a porter who works at city hall, while Lila’s father is a shoemaker. It becomes apparent very early on that Lila is extremely intelligent — she has taught herself to read and write, though her parents are barely literate. At the end of elementary school, their teacher attempts to persuade both families to let their daughters take the middle school exam and study further. Lenu’s parents are ultimately convinced while Lila’s are not. This marks the moment when the two girls’ lives begin to diverge. Lenu continues to study and eventually secures a university scholarship while Lila enters into an early marriage (which ultimately becomes abusive). Both women are drawn to the same man — Nino Sarratore — a childhood friend with whom both have an affair at different times.

One of the major themes of the novels is the nature of female friendship. Lenu and Lila have an often fraught relationship. There is an element of resentment from both of them. Lenu feels that Lila is more intelligent than she is, despite not getting the chance to study. Lila is sometimes jealous of the opportunities that Lenu has had to leave the neighborhood and transcend their working-class background. This is symbolized by Lenu being able to speak and write in Italian rather than in the Neapolitan dialect. Lenu also marries into a distinguished family and has access to a whole new lifestyle, which she later abandons in her pursuit of Nino. Their mutual attraction to the same man also leads to some sexual jealousy between them, particularly in adolescence when Lila gets involved with Nino despite knowing how Lenu feels about him. Yet, the two women continue to support each other throughout their lives.