The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan - by Domenico Starnone (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From the National Book Award Finalist Domenico Starnone comes a new novel about childhood, memory, obsession, and the fictions we live by.

Children can be cruel, and children can love as passionately and obsessively as adults. These two observations combine, igniting the imagination of Italy's greatest contemporary novelist and producing a seemingly candid novel that belies 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 the building opposite, watching a black-haired girl as she dances recklessly on her balcony. 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. He could do better, he thinks; he wouldn't fail to bring that dark-haired up from the underground if she were dead, and it only he had the chance.

A short, sharp, perfectly styled and unforgettable novel about love, desire, memory, and death by the Strega Prize-winning Italian author of Ties and International Booker Prize-longlisted author of The House on Via Gemito.

Review Quotes

"At the heart of this novel is the dichotomy between idealized eternal love, as in the Greek myth, and the real, embodied, mortal kind. Through it all, Starnone's prose is charming, witty, and intellectual."--Booklist

"Full of beauty and insight, Starnone's narrative contrasts youth and old age, education and natural wisdom, dreams and reality. This won't be easily forgotten."--Publishers Weekly

"Domenico Starnone's gift to shuffle and deal the cards of a story gets ever more impressive."--La Stampa

"Faultless... The reflection on love, already undertaken in Ties, Trick and Trust, is resumed and refined."--Reading in Translation

Praise for Domenico Starnone's The House on Via Gemito

"Starnone...succeeds beautifully in exploiting Federì's self-contradictions and the unreliability of memory to create what is both a complex family narrative and a masterpiece on the elusive nature of truth."--Christopher Sorrentino, The New York Times on The House on Via Gemito

"Starnone is a writer exquisitely attuned to class anxieties: As his later novels do, Via Gemito explores the emotional cost of class mobility, and the psychic toll of changing one's speech patterns and behavior for the sake of social and financial gain...In Starnone's novels, releasing yourself from whatever bitterness consumed your parents is an ultimately futile pursuit."--Idra Novey, The Atlantic

"A vivid, fluid, richly detailed drama, tormented and hilarious."--Tim Parks, The Washington Post

"[The House on Via Gemito] presents a vivid rainbow of sediments: a boy's initiations, with every antenna trembling, tuning in secrets of both family and neighborhood; and an evisceration of the creative life, exposing both how the world crushes its artists and how artists sabotage their own efforts; and all this erupts like Naples in full cry."--John Domini, The Brooklyn Rail

"The House On Via Gemito is an exuberant portrait of the writer as a young (and then middle-aged) man, and an allegory of the role of the artist, adrift in the Sargasso of modernity."--Hamilton Cain, On the Seawall

Praise for Trust

"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