Ties - Domenico Starnone

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Ties

by
Domenico Starnone

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	Ties
Author:	Domenico Starnone
Genre:	Novel
Written:	2014 (Eng. 2017)
Length:	150 pages
Original in:	Italian
Availability:	Ties - US
	Ties - UK
	Ties - Canada
	Auf immer verbunden - Deutschland
	Lacci - Italia
	Ataduras - España

Italian title: Lacci
Translated and with an Introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri

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Our Assessment:

B+ : effective exposing of a marriage and family

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Financial Times	.	17/3/2017	Suzi Feay
The NY Times Book Rev.	.	26/3/2017	Rachel Donadio
The Observer	.	26/3/2017	Anthony Cummins
Publishers Weekly	.	16/1/2017	.
La Stampa	.	12/11/2014	Sergio Pent
TLS	.	21/4/2017	Frances Wilson
World Lit. Today	.	9-10/2017	Andrew Martino

From the Reviews:

"Ingeniously constructed (.....) The question of who is in the right or wrong is carefully balanced" - Suzi Feay, Financial Times

"Ties is not only the leanest, most understated and emotionally powerful novel by Domenico Starnone (...) it is also a key text in that burning literary mystery: Who is behind the pseudonymous novelist Elena Ferrante ? (...) Ties responds to Ferrante’s 2002 novel The Days of Abandonment (...) and turns it inside out." - Rachel Donadio, The New York Times Book Review

"Clever, concise and astringent (.....) (T)he story glints and cuts like smashed crystal." - Anthony Cummins, The Observer

"Though Starnone’s willingness to let his characters -- particularly Aldo -- incriminate themselves can be read as writerly confidence, the novel, despite being slim, feels long." - Publishers Weekly

"Un testo anomalo, quasi una pièce teatrale, in cui a turno entrano in scena i personaggi per raccontare la propria versione dei fatti, e cioè un comunissimo dramma familiare che tuttavia incide a fondo -- e per sempre -- sulle vite dei protagonisti. (...) Lacci è una commedia leggera e disincantata, che si legge con gusto e malinconia" - Sergio Pent, La Stampa

"While their home in Naples is run with military precision, emotional chaos is secreted in forgotten letters and metal cubes. Ties is at the same time a lethal critique of domestic "order" and a very ordered book. It has, moveover -- like Aldo himself -- a double life. The novel is a two-handed trick; its Chinese boxes are contained by yet another -- external -- narrative frame." - Frances Wilson, Times Literary Suppelement

"But perhaps most subtly, Ties is about the relationships between the translator and the text and the author and his readers. (...) Ties is an extraordinary novel. Most striking is that Ties reveals that beneath our manufactured roles of husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, and of children, we are all human, deeply flawed and often with irrepressible desires and drives." - Andrew Martino, World Literature Today

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Ties is a novel about a marriage, of Aldo and Vanda, and of the effects of their relationship on their two children, Sandro and Anna. The three-part presentation of the story is unusual and effective.
       The first section of the novel consists of a handful of letters Vanda wrote to Aldo, beginning twelve years into their marriage, when Aldo fell in love with another woman, Lidia. He eventually abandoned his family for her, but the final letter, four years after the affair began, suggests he wants to at least reëstablish a relationship with his children. The second and longest section of the novel finds Aldo and Vanda heading off on a summer vacation; it is four decades later, and they are now in their mid-seventies; obviously Aldo returned to the fold.
       Vanda's letters to her husband give only one side of the collapse of the family, but Aldo's failings are so blatant as be essentially indefensible; there's little doubt when Vanda calls him out: "Jesus, you really are a weak and confused man: insensitive, superficial". Vanda's letters range from searching for answers to desperation and resignation; whatever excuses Aldo offers when they communicate -- Vanda mentions some --, there are no real answers. The letters do give a glimpse of the collapse of the family, Aldo rapidly distancing himself from his wife and children, unable to maintain a relationship even with the eager-to-please kids. That Lidia is much younger -- a nineteen-year-old, fifteen years his junior when the relationship begins -- might suggest it won't last, but it's certainly more than a brief fling.
       Jumping ahead forty years, Vanda and Aldo seem like a typical long-married couple, but it doesn't take long to reveal that those old fissures took their toll, and that whatever was put back together is far from a fully satisfying state of affairs.
       This section is related by Aldo and, as the couple prepares to go away for a bit, he describes some minor but aggravating incidents in which he was taken advantage of, small signs all adding to his sense that:

I was in danger of losing control of the entire delicate system of weights and counterweights that had kept my life in check for five decades.

       More upsetting then is what the couple finds -- and what they don't -- upon their return from their seaside getaway. Their home has been ransacked. Everything is a mess. In the mess, the intruders apparently didn't even manage to find what few valuables there were; very little is missing -- though, to Vanda's great consternation, the cat is.
       Over the course of his account, Aldo reveals more about both present and past. Among the few things missing from the home invasion are some photographs he had kept carefully hidden, polaroids of Lidia that he had held onto all these years. He describes their relationship, and his failing his family, from his point of view, and it makes him look no better than Vanda's letters did. But gaps are filled in, including him returning to the fold, as well as the state of the marriage these past four decades.
       It's no surprise the kids haven't done particularly well in adulthood: "They turn to us for money, their lives are a mess". Sandro has four children, with three different women; Anna has: "refused to bring children into the world". The two don't get along, either, a dispute over the inheritance from their aunt, who favored one of them, driving a deep wedge between them. As for Aldo and Vanda, though they've stayed together, Aldo admits: "I've been stubbornly unfaithful up until a few years ago".
       Aldo also reasons:

From the crisis of many years ago we have both learned that we need to hide a great deal from each other, and tell each other even less. It's worked.

       Or so he thinks, anyway. From the outside, it doesn't look like quite such an impressive achievement.
       The short final section of the book, narrated by Anna, brings the two children together while their parents are on vacation. They had promised to feed the cat in their parents' absence -- on alternating days, since they don't want to have much to do with one another --, but Anna reveals that she hasn't bothered, explaining: "I can't handle being in that house on my own". The meet up there, and Anna's account brings in the kids' perspective on their parents' marriage, and their own experiences, then and since, a fitting coda to shatter most of the last illusions about this family.
       Ties isn't so much grim as sad, a portrait of a family that is dysfunctional in its own peculiar, depressing way, each of the members flawed. There's blame enough to go around, but Aldo certainly has more than his fair share. Many aspects are left unclear, beginning with Aldo's passion for Lidia (and, even more so, her apparent passion for him), which is only partly explored and explained, shown more in its shadows (Lidia is rarely a physical presence, but her existence casts a shadow over the others -- even after Aldo has tried to let her go) than examined head-on.
       It's in its unusual, selective and limited scenes-from-a-life presentation that Ties makes the strongest impression. These are only slivers of their lives, with much elided over, but the three perspectives and the overlap of some details, suggest so much about how these lives have been lived, and how these characters have failed -- themselves and each other.
       Ties is not a pleasant story, and its characters not particularly sympathetic, but it is a fine piece of story-telling -- perhaps even too expert in its construction: there is a feel of legerdemain to it --, capturing and conveying a great deal in a relatively small space.

- M.A.Orthofer, 26 February 2017

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Links:

Ties:

Europa Editions publicity page
Einaudi publicity page

Reviews:

Other books by Domenico Starnone under review:

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Italian literature

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About the Author:

Italian author Domenico Starnone was born in 1943.

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