In a 2015 New York Times Magazine interview, the fashion doyenne and nonagenarian Iris Apfel laid out, in a few sentences, an aesthetic manifesto: “Style has nothing to do with how much you spend on your clothes. The most stylish people I’ve seen in my life were in Naples right after the Second World War. They were all practically in tatters. But the way they threw themselves together and carried themselves, they really looked like a squillion dollars.”
I recalled Apfel’s pithy comment while reading The House on Via Gemito, an autofiction by Italian author Domenico Starnone, originally published in 2000 and winner of the prestigious Strega Prize; it now appears in English for the first time, superbly translated by Oonagh Stransky. The book is both a triumph of style and an indelible chronicle of a Naples in the throes of change. Starnone’s characters enter and exit with expert timing, impoverished, war-weary, but with chins held high.
He places us front and center in a personal myth, with his narrator, Domenico — known by his nickname, Mimí — an agile and captivating guide. There’s a love triangle at the book’s core: the tender and vicious lines between father, mother, and child: Federí, Mimí, and Rusinè, the beautiful and extroverted woman who serves as the whiteboard for her husband’s rants. Born in 1943, as Allied troops rolled up the Italian peninsula, shelling cities and foraging for supplies, Mimí lives with extended family in small, decrepit rooms as peace settles, in fits and starts, over Europe. He listens, transfixed, to tales spun by his father, a raconteur whose differing accounts of the same event contradict each other — tales of love and blood, feuds and truces, fates and fortunes.
Make no mistake: The House on Via Gemito belongs to the larger-than-life Federí. In the book’s first section, “The Peacock,” he struts and swears and swoons, driven by mood swings, societal dislocations, and battles with his in-laws. He falls hard for Rusinè when he first meets her in 1938, and they become engaged. As a railroad employee and aspiring artist, he earns a solid wage. In 1940 he volunteers to fight somewhere — Avignon, the Côte d’Azur, the Russian front, Stalingrad? Federí’s stories morph with each telling. One thing’s certain: he has long harbored an ambition as a painter and had, under a French woman’s tutelage, learned techniques from the Barbizon School. While on break he marries Rusinè; they honeymoon with her aunt and uncle in Florence.
Starnone toggles chronologically amplifying Federí’s bravado. The common denominator is Federí’s creative drive, and how he accuses everyone, particularly Rusinè, for his lack of success. The House on Via Germito clusters around pivotal moments: postwar penury, Mimí’s coming of age, his mother’s premature death in 1965, Federí’s querulous relationships with his adult sons until his own death in 1998. (He was married to Rusinè for 23 years and survived her for 33.) Federí is prone to half-lies and flat-out falsehoods, but is Mimí, too, manipulating characters and events for his own purposes? Is his father an unreliable narrator embedded in an unreliable narrative? Starnone tinkers exquisitely with the porous borders of fiction, memoir, and history.
As Mimí grows older, he absorbs, and later shrugs off, his father’s diatribes. The family grapples with financial woes. The boy sleeps amid his three younger brothers and maternal grandmother in one cranny while his parents occupy another; Federí and Rusinè often argue into the night. He hits his wife with abandon, though later claims to have slapped her only once. After one disappointing showing of his paintings, he blames Rusinè for distracting potential customers; he strikes her, again and again.
“I added up all the punches that already took place but which I didn’t see with the ones I am seeing,” Mimí observes. “I add up the ones I heard from bed with the ones I am hearing now — I’m still adding them up now as I write — when smacks and words echo endlessly, saying she’s no longer allowed to leave the house, never, ever again; because of her my father lost at least 300,000 lire this evening. Engineer Isabella wanted to buy two paintings, they had been negotiating, and what did she do? She started busting his balls with all that smiling, flirting, showing her leg. You don’t get it Rusinè, your giggling, your laugh, you don’t understand. You don’t know who these people are. They’re shit! Poet, my ass. Sculptor, my ass. Engineer, my ass! Right now they’re standing outside the Galleria, laughing, and you know what they are saying; that fellow from the railroad only sells his painting thanks to his wifey, they’re saying; without her he’d be zilch, he doesn’t even know how to paint; and you, you brought it all on with your vanity, your vanity! You’re so vain! And more words followed, all in dialect, all accompanied by the sound of him slapping her, with many colorful, unspeakable offenses.”
Mimí and his brothers strive to emulate their father, hoping to escape his rages. They embrace his views until they don’t. (Federí’s politics are as pliable as his storytelling.) Starnone is interrogating male violence, how it’s coded and passed down like a gene variant. Federí’s teachers recognized his talent early, encouraging him to apply to art school, but his father insisted on a more practical trade as a railways employee, cutting off his son’s education … or did he? “My father talked a lot about the importance of school and studying. The urge I feel to study comes from him,” Mimí notes. “One day he’d say he had graduated, another day that he had not. He was capable of talking about all sorts of subjects, both in theory and practice. To my mother’s great chagrin, sometimes he even went out on a limb and said that he had a university degree . . . later on, in the 1990s, and in his notebooks, a veil fell over his blustery stories of artistic precociousness, his lively tales of self-celebration faded, the desire to constantly reinvent himself from head to toe dried up. It was as if for a number of years he kept his genius inside, and, feeling deep humiliation, decided to silence it.”
For decades his wife had been the lightning rod for his tantrums. Mimí wonders at the mystery of her: “I don’t know anything about her and yet she’s everywhere.” In The House of Via Gemito, she mostly sits at her Singer sewing machine, quietly tolerating Federí’s rages while tending to her sons and, later, a daughter. In the last years of her life a chronic illness pares down her strength, stoking her husband’s guilt and instinct to lash out.
After his father’s death, Mimí vows to track down Federí’s gorgeous I Bevitori (“The Drinkers”), reproduced in color as the book’s cover art. The influences of those Barbizon painters — and, to my eye, the Fauves and Cézanne’s still lifes — shape the composition and colors of I Bevitori: a boy pours water from a demijohn into a glass clasped by a shirtless laborer, as two other men await their turn. The flattened planes of pink, sienna, olive-green and cocoa-brown draw us in, as does the repetition of rounded forms, such as heads, hats, fruits, and vessel. The artist collapses the space, but the limbs of the figures splay into verticals and diagonals that lend a dynamism and immediacy to the scene. Perhaps Federí was justified in his frustrations.
As Mimí journeys across Italy, looking for the painting, he reconstructs its creation in 1953, the impact it had on the family, and the praise lavished by critics. Mimí traces his mother’s illness to that year, and mulls the possibility that his father’s obsessions made her sick. He himself modeled for the figure of the boy: “Now Federí is sitting at the easel and I’m seated across from him in this uncomfortable pose that he’s forcing me to hold. He’s starting to draw. I feel him casting glances at me, not his normal looks but those of an artist, the ones that feel like ropes with huge hooks or barbs or spears attached to the ends. They pierce me at regular intervals, and are accompanied by rapid, tense gasps; they tear off parts of me that he will use to build his builder’s apprentice, so that I will pour water into the foreman’s glass. The charcoal stick scratches the piece of paper with a nerve-wracking sound, capturing his dark mood and dissatisfaction.”
Son as muse in I Bevitori; father as muse in The House on Via Gemito. Mimí’s quest leads him back to the street where it all began. Starnone’s blurring of genre highlights the trade-offs we make as we seek an authentic self. He plays out the thread of biography as far as it will take him, with galvanizing results. 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. And in Federí he gives us a flawed, profane, yet irresistible foil to the cardboard-thin people that populate our contemporary fiction.
[Published by Europa Editions May 30, 2023, 480 pages, $27.00 hardcover]