The mortal and immortal life of the girl from Milan

Award-winning Italian novelist Starnone's (Trust, 2021) latest, exquisitely translated by Stransky, features 70-year-old Mimi, who recounts his childhood and early adult life. His memories include three tragicomic love affairs. In childhood, he has an unceasing love for the girl from Milan. He is the recipient of the unconditional, almost suffocating love from his grandmother, Nanni. And finally, in early adulthood, he has a relationship with Nina, a student of mathematics. The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice looms large in Mimi's young life, and he becomes engrossed with death and love, an obsession that also becomes integral to his adulthood. When Mimi becomes a student of classics and philology at university, Starnone focuses on language--how ephemeral it can be, and the differences between Neapolitan and Italian--in an almost scholarly section that requires an assiduous reader. At the heart of this novel is the dichotomy between idealized eternal love, as in the Greek myth, and the real, embodied, mortal kind. Through it all, Starnone's prose is charming, witty, and intellectual.

In this deeply affecting story of familial and romantic love, Starnone (Trust) illuminates a boy's life in Naples. Seduced by the legend of Orpheus and his grandmother Nanni's terrifying tales of the underworld, nine-year-old Mimi watches from his window as an unnamed girl pirouettes on her balcony. He fantasizes her as his Eurydice, and dreams of rescuing her from the darkness. The girl represents for him everything he is not and does not have: she is joyful while he is unhappy, she speaks an elegant Italian with her Milanese parents rather than the Neapolitan dialect of his household, and her sunny balcony is full of flowers, whereas his windowsill has only the dirty rag from Nanni's mop. As Mimi comes of age, he duels with his best friend, Lello, for the affections of "the girl from Milan," who leaves for summer vacation and never returns. At university, he reluctantly reconnects with Lello and learns the truth about the girl who has haunted him since childhood. Full of beauty and insight, Starnone's narrative contrasts youth and old age, education and natural wisdom, dreams and reality. This won't be easily forgotten. (Oct.)