The book
Children can be cruel, and children can love as passionately as adults, more so at times. When these two facts combine and ignite the imagination of Italy’s greatest contemporary novelist, extraordinary, unexpected things can come of it. Like this seemingly simply novel that bellies remarkable psychological depths and infinite degrees of enchantment.
Imagine a child, a daydreamer, one of those boys who is always gazing out windows. His adoring grandmother, busy in the kitchen, keeps an eye on him. The child stares at a balcony on the opposite building, watching ablack-haired girl as she dances a reckless, dangerous dance. He is in love. And a love like this can push a child to extremes. He can become an explorer or a cabin boy, a cowboy or castaway; he can fight duels to the death, or even master unfamiliar languages. His grandmother has told him about the entrance to the underworld, and he knows the story of Orpheus’s failed rescue mission. Stupid man, the boy thinks. He could do better, he could bring that dark-haired up from the underground. If only he had the chance.
The moment during childhood in which both love and death are revealed is portrayed to perfection in this latest novel by the Strega Prize-winning Italian novelist, Domenico Starnone, whose books are sharp as tacks, quick to read, and impossible to forget.
The author
Domenico Starnone
Domenico Starnone is considered by many to be Italy’s greatest living author. He is the author of fifteen best-selling works of fiction, including: 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, “a short, sharp novel that cuts like a scalpel to the core of its characters” (LA Times). All three of these novels were translated by Pulitzer Prize-winner, Jhumpa Lahiri.
Starnone’s Strega Prize-winning novel, The House on Via Gemito (Europa, 2023), translated by Oonagh Stransky, was named a Washington Post and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was long-listed for the 2024 International Booker Prize. In 2024, again in Stransky’s translation, Europa released The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan, which the New Yorker described as “wonderfully off-kilter.” His short stories have appeared in the Paris Review, the New Yorker, and the Georgia Review. His most recent novel is The Old Man by the Sea. Starnone is the recipient of many of Italy’s major literary prizes, including: the Strega prize, the Napoli prize, and the Campiello prize.