Ties

What do we leave behind when we abandon someone? The home, the family, the past, the idea of the future, our worst photograph imprinted on the eyes of the person we loved? We spend our lives breaking vases and gluing the pieces back, pretending they are new. We try not to look back often, because the time of reckoning is a time of loss, ridiculous and exhausting. Domenico Starnone has written an extremely moving and true book. A story in three voices about the hidden forces that keep a marriage alive, even after love has faded.

"If it has slipped your mind, dear sir, let me remind you: I am your wife." So opens the letter that Vanda writes to her husband, who has left the house, leaving her with a burden of unanswered questions and a knot of rage waiting to explode.

They married young, at the beginning of the sixties, with a desire for independence, but then the world around them changes, and having a family to support at thirty looks more like a sign of backwardness than of independence. So he moves to Rome, enchanted by the alluring beauty of an unknown girl with whom the days pass cheerfully, while the wife in Naples with the children measures the silence that spreads to the point of distortion. What are we ready to sacrifice, just so as not to feel trapped? What do we lose when we choose to go back along our tracks? Why is there nothing more extreme than abandonment, and at the same time nothing more constricting than the invisible ties that bind people to one another? Domenico Starnone has given us the story of an escape, of a return, the story of all the failures, those that seem insurmountable to us and those that accompany us for our whole lives.

Domenico Starnone (Naples, 1943) worked for a long time as a teacher and has published a number of novels and stories about school life, which also served as screenplays for some films and TV series. He is the winner of the Strega Prize with the novel Via Gemito in 2001. He has also published the novels Labilità (2005, Castiglioncello Prize), Prima esecuzione (2007), Fare scene (2010), Spavento (2009, Comisso Prize), Autobiografia erotica di Aristide Gambía (2011) and Scherzetto (Supercoralli 2016 and ET Scrittori 2017). The novel "Lidhëse" has been translated into more than 15 languages.