LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
The Washington Post・Kirkus Reviews
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE
This extraordinary Strega Prize-winning novel confirms Domenico Starnone’s reputation as one of Italy’s greatest living writers. Told against the backdrop of Naples in the 1960s, a city that itself becomes a vivid character in this lush, atmospheric novel, The House on Via Gemito is a masterpiece of Italian fiction, one that is steeped in Neapolitan lore.
A modest apartment in Via Gemito smelling of paint and turpentine. Its furniture pushed up against the wall to create a make-shift studio. Drying canvases moved from bed to floor each night. Federí, the father, a railway clerk, is convinced that he possesses great artistic promise. If it weren’t for the family he must feed and the jealousy of his fellow Neapolitan artists, nothing would stop him from becoming a world-famous painter. Ambitious and frustrated, genuinely talented but also arrogant and resentful, Federí is scarred by constant disappointment. He is a larger-than-life character, a liar, a fabulist, and his fantasies shape the lives of those around him, especially his young son, Mimi, short for Domenico, who will spend a lifetime trying to get out from under his father’s shadow.
Starnone, a finalist for the National Book Award with Trick, author of New York Times notable book of the year, Ties, and the critically acclaimed Trust, takes readers beyond the slim, novella-length works for which he is known by American readers to create a vast fresco of family, fatherhood, and modern Naples.
“Starnone...succeeds beautifully in exploiting Federì’s self-contradictions and the unreliability of memory to create what is both a complex family narrative and a masterpiece on the elusive nature of truth.”—Christopher Sorrentino, The New York Times
“Starnone is a writer exquisitely attuned to class anxieties: As his later novels do, Via Gemito explores the emotional cost of class mobility, and the psychic toll of changing one’s speech patterns and behavior for the sake of social and financial gain...In Starnone’s novels, releasing yourself from whatever bitterness consumed your parents is an ultimately futile pursuit.”—Idra Novey, The Atlantic
“A vivid, fluid, richly detailed drama, tormented and hilarious.”—Tim Parks, The Washington Post
“Oonagh Stransky’s translation of Domenico Starnone’s monumental novel The House on Via Gemito (Europa Editions, 2023) is a tour de force.”—Reading in Translation
“[The House on Via Gemito] presents a vivid rainbow of sediments: a boy’s initiations, with every antenna trembling, tuning in secrets of both family and neighborhood; and an evisceration of the creative life, exposing both how the world crushes its artists and how artists sabotage their own efforts; and all this erupts like Naples in full cry.”—John Domini, The Brooklyn Rail
“The House On Via Gemito is an exuberant portrait of the writer as a young (and then middle-aged) man, and an allegory of the role of the artist, adrift in the Sargasso of modernity.”—Hamilton Cain, On the Seawall
“The House on Via Gemito serves to show his English readership how much broader his talent is. A memento mori of sorts, the book is a reminder that most of us will only be remembered by how we treated those near to us.”—William Braun, Rain Taxi Review of Books
“Oonagh Stransky has done a good job: this version, for the excellent Europa Editions, is readable and elegant, and deals well with the difficulties of the Neapolitan dialect. Domenico Starnone has remarked that 'it is so rare, in this mud puddle that is Italy, to have international reach.' Thankfully, this is changing. Twenty-three years is a long time to wait for a book this good, but here it is at last.”—Clare Pettit, Times Literary Supplement
★ “Every character...is a full-fledged human being filled with desire, regret, resentment, bitterness, and hope. At the same time, the Neapolitan setting comes equally alive...Starnone, it seems, can do no wrong. A complexly structured masterpiece.”—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
“Domenico Starnone’s most important book.... robust, flawlessly structured and luminously written.”—L’Indice
“A cross-section of Neapolitan life, and a life-story expertly told.”—Benevento
“A masterpiece.”—Reading in Translation
“This contemporary masterpiece was certainly worth the wait.”—Evening Standard
Praise for Domenico Starnone
“A short, sharp novel that cuts like a scalpel to the core of its characters... Starnone has earned a reader’s trust with another agile analysis of frail humanity.”—Los Angeles TimesonTrust
“An Italian master gives it a suspenseful twist in this vibrant novel that’s equal parts Endless Love, la dolce vita, and unreliable narration….A rip of a read.”—Oprah Daily on Trust
“Indirection like that, stirring up terrific curiosity, proves one of the novel’s best gambits…I’d call it the best of Lahiri’s Starnone essays—a fine fit for the best of his recent creative surge.”—Washington Post on Trust
“Electrifying.”—Financial Times on Trick
“Ties is...the leanest, most understated and emotionally powerful novel by Domenico Starnone.”—Rachel Donadio, The New York Times
“Ties is puzzle-like, architectural, a novel ingeniously constructed.”—The New Yorker
About the Author
Domenico Starnone was born in Naples and lives in Rome. He is the author of thirteen works of fiction, including First Execution (Europa, 2009), Ties (Europa, 2017), a New York Times Editors Pick and Notable Book of the Year, and a Sunday Times and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year, Trick (Europa, 2018), a Finalist for the 2018 National Book Award and the 2019 PEN Translation Prize, and Trust (Europa, 2021). The House on Via Gemito won Italy’s most prestigious literary prize, the Strega.
Oonagh Stransky has been a translator of Italian literature for over 20 years. Some of the writers whose work she has brought into English include Pier Paolo Pasolini, Carlo Lucarelli, Giuseppe Pontiggia, and Roberto Saviano. Stransky started studying Italian at Middlebury Language Schools in 1986, got her BA in Comparative Literature from Mills College and UC Berkeley in 1989, and her MA in Italian from Columbia University in 2002. She currently lives in Italy.
