“Correcting Italian homework is a torment. […] read one, you’ve read them all. Three in a row can cause death.” If you have in mind the Starnone of his latest novels, forget him. Form, substance and times belong to another writer (in a figurative sense), the only point of contact between the pen of yesterday and that of today is the ironic component, typical of Neapolitan culture. The book is in fact the disarming transposition...
“How many secrets hide the people with whom we spend life.” A quarrel for futile reasons in a couple, the violent gesture of the woman who with an ashtray breaks the incisors teeths of her partner, and a bottomless pit of memories and obsessions and fears and doubts that opens under the feet of our protagonist, now a name toothless. An “open mouth” journey – if you let us pass the joke – inside and...
“From our parents, I say, I learned only one thing, that you shouldn’t have children.” A book destined to become a classic of Italian literature, as far as beautiful and smooth and complete and intense and unexpected it is. The easy syntax and the organic structure of the story make it a reading intended for some school anthology. The story tells the vicissitudes of a family of the Neapolitan middle class over the years. Divided...
