I came to Domenico Starnone unbiased. I found a copy of his book Ties at a thrift store and I read it last year completely unaware of the rumors connecting him to Elena Ferrante. I had read My Brilliant Friend in 2016, well into or in fact a little past the Ferrante fever that seemed to sweep across my social media feeds, but I never got to any of the other books. The news of her "unmasking," neatly coinciding with the publication of a book of her letters and journals (which I recall getting a rather meh reception) dominated my twitter feed for a couple days and then I mostly forgot about it. I thought her identity had in fact been confirmed subsequent to the exposé. In fact, before googling her today, I had no idea Elena Ferrante was still anonymous. But after reading Ties -- from reading about Ties -- I did learn about the (or more accurately a) posited connection between her and Starnone. (If I had gone ahead and read Days of Abandonment on that day I started My Brilliant Friend instead, would I have noticed the connection when I got to Ties?) In any case, I liked Ties a lot, so when I saw Trick on the staff recommendations shelf at Skylight Books, I bought it. It hardly matters, particularly given that I've only read the one Ferrante book, but unlike when I started Ties, I went into Trick fully believing I was reading the work of Elena Ferrante's husband. Only when I started looking around today did I come across the theories that Starnone is Ferrante or that Ferrante is not a single author but a collaborative effort between Starnone and his wife, Anita Raja. (I find the latter argument rather convincing, without, of course, having myself read much of the material that led to this conclusion.) But leaving all that aside, does it really matter who Starnone is vis-à-vis Ferrante? Perhaps if I'd read more Ferrante, it would matter to me.
So, Trick. The central character of Trick is a 75-year-old man who has managed to escape his poor and violent childhood in Naples to become a successful illustrator, living in Milan. He returns to Naples -- to the apartment he grew up in -- reluctantly, to take care of his 4-year-old grandson while his daughter and son-in-law attend a conference in Cagliari. While he narrates his internal grappling with his own past, with his work, with his health, and with a growing sense of his own mediocrity, he -- and the narrative itself -- are constantly interrupted by the demands and complaints of his grandson. This was so well done as to be stressful to read. I wanted so badly for him to have some peace to complete a thought. The three chapters that make up the book are told in first person narration by the grandfather, but there is also an appendix which is his journal covering the same period, including some illustrations. It's an odd construct. There's a certain amount of redundancy, but the journal doesn't have the depth of the internal monologue that makes up the narrative. I actually felt it detracted from the book appearing at the end, as it did, but only a little.
