Arts Alive San Antonio

Reviewed by Steven.G. Kellman

            “Writing,” according to Domenico Starnone, “is a combination of eros and exhaustion.”  Eros asserts itself in the opening pages of The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan, the sixth Starnone book translated from Italian into English. Eight-year-old Mimi is infatuated with a pretty girl who lives across from his family’s fourth-floor apartment in Naples and frequently dances, perilously, on the parapet of her balcony. Mimi imagines that, if she ever falls and dies, he will, like Orpheus, descend into the underworld and bring her back to life. He does not even know her name, but, because she speaks an Italian more elegant than his working-class Neapolitan, he calls her “the girl from Milan” and assures his friend and rival Lello that he will marry her.

            Another form of eros figures in his widowed grandmother’s unconditional – but unreciprocated – devotion to the boy. “No one in the course of the long arc of my life,” he realizes, “ever gave me as much love.” However, any exhaustion that Starnone, the author of more than twenty novels and recipient of Italy’s most prestigious literary honor, the Strega Prize, might have felt in writing this short, seductive, flawless book is not apparent. An embodiment of what Italians call sprezzatura, a studied nonchalance, it navigates themes of love, death, and language with effortless grace.

As narrator of his own coming-of-age story, Mimi is recounting events more than seven decades later. In his eighties now, he is bemused by his childish infatuation with a girl he barely knew. Her death, under circumstances he does not learn until many years later, constituted his introduction to mortality. In addition, what he is able to glean from his grandmother about how her husband, a mason in his twenties, lost his life falling from a construction site extends his education in impermanence. Language teaches him something of class distinctions.

Ten years later, when Mimi becomes the first in his family to attend a university, he is mocked for his plebeian accent. He decides to study papyrology and glottology, he claims, because “their textbooks were slender and not too costly.” He also concedes that they were tools for social climbing: “Papyrology and glottology were words I’d never heard before, definitely not at home but not even at school, and appropriating them seemed like a good way to signal my cultural elegance to friends, relatives and my new girlfriend.”

From papyrology, the study of ancient manuscripts, Mimi learns about the evanescence of cultures. And glottology, the study of languages, teaches him about the power and limits of words. One of the most endearing episodes in the novel recalls a class assignment for which Mimi is required to interview native speakers of the Neapolitan dialect and transpose 500 of their words into the phonetic alphabet on separate index cards. Instead of seeking out 500 informants, he turns to his doting grandmother to provide him with all 500 words.

Because Mimi is a nickname for Domenico and, born in 1943, Starnone is about the same age as the narrator of his novel, it is tempting to read the book as an oblique memoir, an aging master’s portrait of the artist as a young man. When, late in life, Mimi tries to write about his formative years, “I did so with rational passion, knowing full well that the little life we truly live always remains in the margins, that marks and signs are constitutionally inadequate, fluctuating merely between what you try to say and pure dismay, and thank goodness it is thus.” Unlike the younger Mimi, who is in love with romantic ideals, the narrator recognizes the imperfections of human beings and the limitations of their language. “The problem if there is one, is that the pleasure of writing is fragile,” he explains, “it has a hard time making it up the slippery slope of real life.” That is the secret to distinguishing between the mortal and immortal life of the girl from Milan.————————————————————————————————————–The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan by Domenico Starnone; trans. Oonagh Stransky; Europa; 2024; $18.EFLY