Impossibly, a Peacock

‘Operai che pranzano (I bevitori)’ by Federico Starnone (1953), by permission of the Comune of Positano. Photo © Vito Fusco.

It’s​ an uncompromising way to start a novel: ‘When my father told me that he’d hit my mother only once in their 23 years of marriage, I didn’t even reply.’ But the narrator is replying now, in the more than four hundred pages that follow. The father’s name is Federico, or Federí. The cover of the book shows a detail from an oil painting by Federico Starnone, Operai che pranzano/I bevitori (‘Workmen at Lunch/The Drinkers’), made in 1953. The mother’s name is Rosa, or Rusinè. The novel is dedicated to her. The narrator is called Mimí, short for Domenico, and like the author he was born in Naples in 1943. So the book is autobiographical, and wears its autobiographical elements (literally) on its sleeve, but it is also self-consciously a work of fiction, because the narrator – and no doubt the author, too, though it makes things simpler to do both him and his book the courtesy of maintaining the fiction that it’s fiction – has learned from his father’s negative example the dangers of insisting on the truth of the stories that people make up about themselves when they try to recall their past. It’s important, too, not to change the names, since his father ‘changed the names as he wished’ when railing against whoever he thought had most recently done him wrong.

Federico Starnone died in 1998. Via Gemito was published in 2000 and won the Strega Prize the following year. Oonagh Stransky’s English translation appeared in 2023 and was longlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize. The novel may remind English readers, in different ways, of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (the relationship with the domineering father, the unchanged names, the treatment of time, the reflections on memory, art and writing) or Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (the postwar childhood in Naples, the treatment of time, the reflections on memory, art and writing), though it precedes both those series by a decade. Starnone is married to the writer and translator Anita Raja; they have both, jointly and severally, been fingered as the author of Ferrante’s novels. When Jhumpa Lahiri translated Starnone’s novel Lacci as Ties in 2017, the New York Times reviewer described it as ‘in some ways a sequel’ to Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment, ‘in other ways an interlocking puzzle piece’ – though what other kind of puzzle piece is there? – ‘or another voice in a larger conversation’. But novels don’t have to have been written by the same person, or by people who are married to each other, to be in conversation with one another. That happens anyway, in readers’ heads.

The desire, and ability, to recreate the world around them in accordance with their will is a trait that narcissists, tyrants and artists have in common, and the narrator’s father in Via Gemito is all three. He works for the railways and paints in his spare time, longing for the life of a professional artist and inveighing against all the people he feels have thwarted him: other artists (both living and dead), critics, his colleagues, his bosses, his neighbours, the world at large, his wife’s family and above all Rusinè herself. He never seems to notice how well he has managed to get on as a painter despite the forces allegedly ranged against him. And he never seems to notice the suffering that his wife and children endure, apparently for the sake of his art.

But for all his insistence on the causal connection between his struggles as an artist and the abuse he inflicts on his family, they don’t really have anything to do with one another. His paintings would be no better or worse if he’d been a more considerate husband and father; and, conversely, even if he’d never put brush to canvas, he’d still have terrorised his wife and children. He is a talented painter; he is also a domestic monster. These two facts are irreconcilable, but only in the way that having, say, a broad forehead and full lips (as Federico does) are irreconcilable: they are two distinct yet inseparable facets of the same person. The narrator doesn’t attempt to reconcile them: he tries, rather, to describe his father in all his messy, contradictory, violent, creative, destructive, attractive, repellent vitality – a portrait of the artist as a bad dad.

And for all his complaining about his job and his family getting in the way of his art, it’s more the other way round: Federico is painting all the time that he’s complaining he doesn’t get to paint. He complains that he doesn’t have a proper place to paint, but when he converts the flat on Via Gemito into his studio, his family might more reasonably complain that they don’t have a proper place to live. His children and mother-in-law have to sleep among the unfinished canvases and the fumes of paint and turpentine. And he gives no thought to what Rusinè might have given up by becoming his wife – with five children and countless miscarriages – even before we get to his fatally dismissing the symptoms of her undiagnosed liver disease. When she interrupts her husband’s painting to tell him she feels a heavy pain in her abdomen, he tells her she’s fine and should stop bothering him. ‘At those words Rusinè really felt better and returned to the kitchen.’

The English title, The House on Via Gemito, is a little misleading, since the casa in question isn’t a house but a two-room apartment in a large block of flats. There is a big kitchen, and a modern bathroom with a flushing toilet, which fascinates five-year-old Mimí and his younger brother. When the third brother is born, the two older boys, woken by the noise, are frightened at the sight of the bloody sheets the midwife is carrying, but she reassures them that everything’s all right, the stork has delivered their baby brother but then changed its mind and tried to take the baby back, so their father killed the stork and flushed it down the toilet – the truth, surely, would have been less disturbing.

The flat belongs to the Italian railway. The family used to share an overcrowded and bombed-out apartment with Rusinè’s many relatives, all of whom Federico loathes with a passion. Desperate to move out, he goes whenever he has a spare moment to the railway housing office to see if any workers’ flats have become available. The housing officer must have something against him, because he always gets the same answer: no, sorry. But one day, while Federico’s in there, someone comes in with the keys to an apartment that’s just been vacated on Via Gemito. Federico grabs the keys and runs for it. It’s a wonderful story, and for a moment it appears to show the narrator’s father in a straightforwardly heroic light – but then Mimí mentions his nagging worry that the railway officials could come at any moment and take their house away from them, and the light changes.

The novel has multiple time schemes: the narrator’s present, following his father’s death; a series of key moments from his childhood, which structure the three parts of the novel; and episodes from his father’s life, which appear to range – or trample – freely over everything else, and provide much of the novel’s narrative momentum. At one level, all that happens in part one (‘The Peacock’) is that Mimí, aged five, is sent to the bedroom in the apartment on Via Gemito to fetch the cigarettes from his father’s jacket pocket while his parents squabble in the kitchen. The corridor is haunted by the ghosts of the dead – an aunt who died young but also the legions of imagined adversaries the small boys have killed in their games – and to walk its length alone in the dark is to run a gauntlet of fear. When at last Mimí gets to his parents’ room, he finds there, impossibly, a peacock. It’s unclear if the bird is real, a picture, a trick of the light, or a product of the boy’s imagination, like the ghosts, though (also like the ghosts) it’s certainly real to Mimí. From a certain point of view, the peacock is his father: preening, menacing, competitive, prodigious, unforgettable. But when Federico, impatient for his cigarettes, comes to fetch them himself, he does not, or cannot, see the peacock.

For most of the two hundred pages of part two, ‘The Boy Pouring Water’, the narrator, aged ten, is posing as an artist’s model for one of the figures in his father’s masterpiece, I bevitori, an enormous canvas – though not literally a canvas, since it’s painted on one of Rusinè’s best bedsheets – showing four workmen on a building site pausing for their midday meal. Federico says it’s a homage to (or reinterpretation of) Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, transposed from a bourgeois to a proletarian setting. Velázquez’s Triumph of Bacchus (or Los borrachos) is another antecedent. The influence of Cézanne – once reviled by Federico, later embraced – is perhaps visible in it too. But the narrator, and the novel, are more interested in the painter’s human models: the uncle who posed for the figure sitting on a crate on the left of the picture, sleeves rolled up, glass in hand, mastiff beside him, both man and dog looking out at the viewer; Luigi, an itinerant fruit and vegetable seller, shown sitting shirtless on the ground in the middle of the image, his back to the viewer as he holds out a glass to be filled by the boy pouring water from a heavy demijohn. Federico complains endlessly about how hopeless the men are, unable to sit still, and Mimí is determined to do better than them, not to let his father down, despite the discomfort of the pose his father puts him in, the pain it causes in his knee.

While Federico is painting Mimí, he tells stories from his own childhood, remembering – or claiming to remember – how, at eighteen months, he ran away from his mother down to the stream to play in the mud and mould shapes from the clay: ‘For hours he experiences the power of forgetting one world to build another.’ Eventually he realises that everyone’s out looking for him – his mother calling ‘F-d-rí, F-d-rí’, the neighbours calling ‘Fdrííí, Fdrííí’ – and he runs home to hide behind the wardrobe door. He hears his mother coming down the corridor, one heel tapping on the floor, the other not. She beats him with the heel of the shoe she holds in her hand. He wets himself. They are living in Calabria, where his father, recently demobbed (it’s 1920), has been sent to work for the railways. The child is sent back to Naples to live with his maternal grandmother, who calls him Fdricchié, lets him draw on the doors and walls, and reassures him that his mother hitting him round the head with her shoe only made him more intelligent. When his wife hears him telling this tale to their son, she suggests instead, with a laugh, that his mother broke his brain with her shoe and made him crazy.

Posing for his father, listening to his father’s stories about his childhood struggles with his own father, the narrator tries to remember equivalent episodes of conflict or struggle from his own childhood, and can’t think of any. But he’s living through one now. There’s another kind of role reversal going on, too, as Domenico, telling the story, is now the artist, using his father as the model for the character called ‘Federico’. And it’s notable that, in keeping with his method in the novel, the narrator uses the models’ names for the figures in the painting, resisting his father’s attempt to fictionalise the world around them.

As Mimí is trying to keep still, trying to ignore the pain in his knee, a strange thing happens: he becomes able to imagine himself in the scene that his father is painting, and sees that Federico has miscalculated. Luigi, holding out his glass for the boy pouring the water, is too far away. Look at the painting on the cover after reading this, and you see that he’s right: either Luigi’s arm is much too long, or the water jet in the painting is impossible; the representation of horizontal distance, the boy higher up the canvas than the man, is figured as vertical distance. It’s an optical illusion, like an Escher drawing, the water pouring down from far away, somehow, in its short drop, crossing the expanse of the cloth, the bread, the plate of tomatoes – an effect made possible only by the collapsing of three dimensions into two. But you wouldn’t notice it (I didn’t) if Starnone hadn’t pointed it out from the narrator’s perspective as the model imagining himself inside the painting, two dimensions expanding into three. And, perhaps strangest of all, noticing it doesn’t spoil the painting, or burst the illusion; from a compositional point of view, it’s arguably better as it is. There’s a difference, in other words, between successful (coherent, cohesive) art and realistic representation of reality, between aesthetic and mimetic truth. It could be argued that there are similar distortions in the novel, though of time rather than space. It could also be argued that privileging aesthetic over mimetic truth is a mistake: Rusinè, appraising the finished painting, says it’s beautiful, but ‘there’s just this arm of Luigi’s, it’s too long.’

As the narrator wanders the streets of Naples after his father’s death, the urge comes and goes to seek out evidence to test his father’s stories, though whether to confirm their truth or expose their lies is unclear, even to him. In any case, he keeps putting off a visit to the town hall in Positano to see the canvas of I bevitori, though he does eventually go to the council offices in Naples, where he is taken on a dispiriting tour in search of two of his father’s pictures: dispiriting for him, at least; for the reader, it’s a tour de force of bureaucratic comedy. His father’s stories, too, often turn to bureaucratic tragicomedy, as he has run-ins with a variety of authority figures or perceived rivals at the railway (bosses, colleagues, union officials, mafiosi), at painting competitions, and at the communist papers L’Unità and La Voce del Mezzogiorno, where he works for a while as an illustrator and cartoonist.

Federico’s politics are all over the place, his convictions held with great fervour but never for long. He claims to have joined the Communist Party as early as August 1944, but his son wonders how to square that with some of his other claims, and other stories, like the one about how he was called a ‘fascist’ by a trade union official when he was working at the railway station ticket office. He was a fascist in his youth, and proudly describes the time he beat up a shoeshine boy who insulted him and his brother. He claims (also proudly) to have fought on the Russian front, though the timing doesn’t quite work for that either, because wasn’t he in France then? He is scornful of the Allies’ claims to be ‘liberating’ Naples and points to the time American planes blew up a train full of Italian children; his reaction to the arrival of Black GIs is overtly racist. But then he gets a job painting the scenery (and interpreting, and pretty much everything else, so he says) at the Teatro Bellini, which has been requisitioned by the British, who pay him handsomely, and his attitude to the Allies grows considerably warmer. He’s contemptuous of his colleagues who pretend to have been partisans, a form of dissembling he never stooped to, even if it might have helped his artistic career. But when was it, exactly, that he joined the Communist Party, if he ever really did? (Starnone’s own politics have been more consistently left-wing: his first book, Ex cattedra e altre storie di scuola, based on his work as a secondary school teacher, was published in 1987 by Il Manifesto, where he edited the culture pages.)

Returning to Naples as an adult and walking around looking for the places that had been important to Federico, the narrator realises that he and his father had never walked around the city together. ‘There was no place in the city of which I could have said: we stopped here and said this and that.’ He often went out with his mother, and walking down Via Santa Teresa degli Scalzi now, many years after her death, he’s aware of her silent presence; but he can’t think of his father without hearing his voice. Federico’s voice dominates the novel in every sense, drowning out the voices of others, above all the narrator’s mother.

‘I could see everything with my own eyes,’ the narrator says at one point, ‘but I don’t know what I saw. Yes, I have to admit it: I don’t know. My testimony is worth nothing. My father told me the story so many times that, now that I come to write about it, I don’t know how to distinguish between what I saw myself and what he showed me with his words.’ But it doesn’t matter, because ‘in these pages it’s his words that count.’ The narrator later describes his attempts, in adolescence, to empty his mind of his father’s words, to free himself from words altogether. This is in part three, ‘The Dancer’. The dancer is the uncle of Nunzia, a friend of the narrator’s cousins with whom he’s fallen hopelessly in love. Federico can’t help seeing the dancer as a rival, or competitor, and can’t bear to see him hogging the limelight at parties.

Those parties are a source of anguish and misery to the narrator, who is an awkward dancer, beneath Nunzia’s notice. The very worst of them takes place on the day of his (belated) First Communion, when he definitively loses his faith. His mother has insisted on dressing him and his brother Geppe as friars in honour of St Ciro, to give thanks to the saint for Geppe’s recovery from scarlet fever. Mimí’s cousins laugh at his too-short habit, which looks like a girl’s dress and reveals his skinny, hairy shins. He has to watch as Rusinè is kissed on the hand by the dancer, knowing what his father’s response will be. Just when it seems things can’t get any worse, ‘at that moment Nunzia arrived.’ And it only gets more mortifying from there.

Mimí has the terrible thought that if his mother died he wouldn’t be constrained by trying not to cause her more suffering than she undergoes already; he could be free to escape (possibly after killing his father too). He doesn’t realise that she is in fact dying. Her death, on 8 October 1965, brings the novel to a close: it has been circling round it, spiralling inwards, since the beginning. For her husband, ever the narcissist, her death ‘wasn’t the end of her life so much as the turning point of his’ (he left Naples for Paris in the late 1960s, married again and lived another thirty years). But their son is careful not to make the same mistake.

I don’t love Oonagh Stransky’s translation (and haven’t always followed it when quoting from the novel here), too often pizzicato where the original is arco, though that is in part an artefact of rendering Italian in English, as is the effect of turning ordinary Italian words into their Latinate English equivalent, dressing up the demotic in a starched collar. There are some peculiar errors – salto mortale, for instance, is a fairly ordinary way of saying ‘somersault’, which here becomes a literal-minded ‘death-defying leap’; pubblico can mean ‘public’ but it’s also ‘audience’ or ‘crowd’ – but a few of those are inevitable in a book of this length. In an ideal world every translated novel would be gone over by a bilingual editor, but the economics of publishing translations are already so precarious, the margins so narrow, that to give them that extra editorial attention must be impossible.

A more interesting challenge is presented by the Neapolitan dialect. A lot of it consists of (some fairly magnificent) swearing from Federico, who is relentlessly foul-mouthed. Sometimes Stransky simply translates it (figliezòccola becomes ‘sonofabitches’); with other words and phrases she includes the Neapolitan before translating: ‘’st’uommenemmèrd, those pieces of shit’. (In non-sweary contexts, keeping the original can make rather less sense: when Nunzia’s uncle is calling out the steps of a quadrille, Starnone transliterates the incomprehensible French words into Italian: ‘tour de main gauche’, for example, is written as ‘tur demangòsce’. For some reason Stransky opts to preserve the phonetic Italian spelling, even though a lot of English readers are likely to struggle with it and the joke gets lost.)

There are moments when the untranslatable obscenity is crucial to the story, and Stransky makes the wise decision to leave it in dialect. As the narrator is trying to remember the moment at which he first felt an impulse to murder his father, he goes back to the summer of 1954, when he’s eleven, watching from the kitchen window in Via Gemito as another boy writes the word pucchiacca on the shutters of a shop over the road. He finds the word thrilling, sexy, mysterious, even if he’s not quite sure what it means (it means ‘cunt’), until his father comes up behind him, puts a hand on his shoulder and asks him to read it aloud, claiming he can’t see well enough to read it himself. The ‘furtive pleasure’ that the boy had been feeling curdles to shame, and he can’t bring himself to say the word. ‘Don’t you know how to read?’ his father taunts him, holding him firmly against the windowsill, bending over him (it sounds like a form of sublimated sexual abuse, and it is). Burning with embarrassment, sensing the pubblico of uncles and cousins growing behind him, the boy says nothing. ‘Mimí doesn’t know how to read,’ his father says, with mock disappointment. He shakes him hard and says the word aloud himself. But Mimí does know how to read, and he knows how to write too.