Publishers Weekly
08/02/2021
Starnone (Trick) returns with an elegant story of a man’s lifelong struggle to perfect his public persona while hiding a secret. Pietro Vella, a self-important 30-something high school teacher, has a tempestuous affair with Teresa Quadraro, a former student who is eight years his junior. She suggests that in order to preserve their love, they each tell the other their worst secret. His involves an “embarrassing affair,” while hers remains unspecified. But their increasingly abusive relationship—he talks down to her, she threatens him with a knife, he drags her by the hair in a fit of jealousy over another man—doesn’t last long. Pietro later marries Nadia, a former colleague, yet continues to obsess over Teresa. When Pietro is 80, his daughter, Emma, lobbies to ensure he is awarded a prestigious teaching award. Much to Pietro’s horror, Teresa, now a renowned scientist, is invited to speak at the ceremony. Lahiri’s intelligent translation captures Starnone’s subtle account of the characters’ shifting power dynamics, and the novel ends with Teresa’s take on their affair, in which she admits she still loves him and ambiguously claims to be “far more dangerous than he.” Teresa’s voice is a tonic after Pietro’s misogynistic narration, but it’s too brief. This will leave readers wanting more. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
Praise for Trust
★ “Richly nuanced while also understated, Starnone’s latest appearance in English is a novel to be savored.”—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
“A short, sharp novel that cuts like a scalpel to the core of its characters... Starnone has earned a reader’s trust with another agile analysis of frail humanity.”—Los Angeles Times
“Translation shows me how to work with new words, how to experiment with new styles and forms, how to take greater risks, how to structure and layer my sentences in different ways.”—Jhumpa Lahiri on the joy of translation as discovery, Lit Hub
“A sweeping examination of aging, love, and success... This is the third of Starnone’s novels that Lahiri has translated over the last six years, and her deft hand seamlessly reveals Starnone’s masterful narrative at every turn.”—Booklist
“Starnone (Trick) returns with an elegant story of a man’s lifelong struggle to perfect his public persona while hiding a secret.”—Publishers Weekly
“Absolutely brilliant! I have to say: Jhumpa Lahiri has done an amazing job. She is the best translator a writer could wish for.”—RTE Radio
“An Italian master gives it a suspenseful twist in this vibrant novel that’s equal parts Endless Love, la dolce vita, and unreliable narration….A rip of a read.”—Oprah Daily
“Indirection like that, stirring up terrific curiosity, proves one of the novel’s best gambits…I’d call it the best of Lahiri’s Starnone essays — a fine fit for the best of his recent creative surge.”—Washington Post
“Acclaimed Italian novelist and National Book Award finalist Starnone’s newest novel explores vulnerability, relationships, and the gulf between our public and private selves.”—The Millions
“Starnone is a masterful storyteller.”—Reading in Translation
“Electrifying.”—Financial Times
“With a few deft strokes of his concentrated prose, [Starnone] tears down the curtains, blinding his audience with daylight.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“The book that taught me what translation was.”—Jhumpa Lahiri, The New Yorker
Praise for Domenico Starnone
“One of Italy’s most accomplished novelists.”—Tim Parks, The Guardian
“Starnone packs a huge amount into a small compass. Engrossing.”—The Sunday Times
“Their relationship, perfectly captured by Starnone’s precise writing, gives the novel a rich foundation to allow for a juxtaposition of the old and the new, the rigid and the silly, while also providing readers with moments of pure comic relief, marked by the characters’ signature, witty stichomythia.”—Vox
“Short and emotionally astute, a shrewd mix of humor and dread that keeps you reading.”—The Chicago Tribune
“Domenico Starnone has written an emotionally complex, layered story whose brevity serves to amplify profound themes of self-identity, marriage, aging, death and the daunting sacrifices of the creative life.”—Shelf Awareness (Starred Review)
“A superb, sometimes unsettling intergenerational portrait hitting on basic truths.”—Library Journal (Starred Review)
“[A] new book from Starnone is an event to celebrate.”—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
“Ties is...the leanest, most understated and emotionally powerful novel by Domenico Starnone.”—Rachel Donadio, The New York Times
“Ties is puzzle-like, architectural, a novel ingeniously constructed.”—The New Yorker
“[Ties] is as vivid and devastating as anything you will read this year. A slim, stunning meditation on marriage, fidelity, honesty, and truth.”—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2021-08-18
A pair of lovers make an unsettling pact.
Pietro and Teresa keep breaking up and getting back together until one day, finally, Teresa suggests a way to bind themselves together: They’ll each confess their worst secret. They do, but, a few days later, they break up again—this time for good. Time passes; Pietro meets Nadia, marries her, begins to have children, sees his career taking off. Teresa moves from Italy to the United States. And yet she still holds an enigmatic but intense power over Pietro: “We’d mutually revealed not only who we really were,” he explains, “free from all staging, but had also revealed, one to the other, who, had the occasion arisen, we might have been.” This is the fourth of Starnone’s novels to appear in English, and, like the previous three, there is a tight, compact quality to it—there is nothing here that doesn’t need to be here, not a single extraneous sentence. Starnone excels not only with plot and form, but in his depictions of the subtleties of living and loving. “Love, well, what to say?”—that’s the very first sentence of the novel (which is beautifully translated by Lahiri). Pietro lives his life knowing that Teresa, and only Teresa, knows the worst in him and can, at any moment, expose him for it—that possibility hangs over his every decision like a threat. But in the last quarter of the book, Starnone tightens his reins even further. The story, it turns out, isn’t just about trust—but also about how we create our own lovers to suit the selves we’d like to be—or, at any cost, not to be.
Richly nuanced while also understated, Starnone’s latest appearance in English is a novel to be savored.
