2.5, rounded down, after waiting a day to gather my thoughts. I very much enjoyed Starnone's sharp and suspenseful novellas Ties and Trick, both of which were deftly translated (as is Trust) by Jhumpa Lahiri. Oddly, Lahiri's afterword, which describes this translation as her daily Covid project and points out Latinate allusions that eluded me entirely, is far more lucid than Starnone's writing, which felt baggy, redundant, and monotonous.

Especially in the novella's first two-thirds, which take the form of a memoir by Pietro, a high-school teacher who recounts his torrid and operatically melodramatic affair with his former student Teresa (in the unreconstructed Fellini-ish patriarchy of Rome in the 1970s) and its lifelong obsessive aftermath. Both Pietro and Teresa confess a horrible, life-ruining secret to the other (no spoilers), and after their sudden breakup, they surveil each other in a chaste "ethical marriage," as Teresa exploits the secret to blackmail Pietro into not straying from his wife Nadia and falling into the arms of an fantasy object of desire.

This sounds like it might be the setup for a lean and suspenseful story of stalking from afar, but it's interrupted by dreadfully dull lectures and debates about educational reform, and Pietro is a frustrating protagonist, with few defining characteristics beyond an unconscious and pervasive misogyny that warps his relationships with his lover, wife, and daughter.

The novel concludes with two additional first-person confessions, by Pietro's daughter Emma and Teresa herself, which don't resolve any of the lingering narrative tension, or provide any new revelations about Pietro's own moral blind spots and madonna/whore complex, which could be glimpsed from low Earth orbit by any semi-sentient being.

Thanks to Europa Editions and Netgalley for providing me with an ARC of Trust in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.

This was my first Starnone but I'm afraid the intent of the book passed me by and I struggled to engage with it. The premise sounds intriguing: that two lovers exchange confidences on something they've never shared with anyone else and then split up. But the long length of time covered by the novel (about 40-50 years) and the shifting narratives from Pietro to his adult daughter and then to his original lover who knows his 'secret' never really cohered for me.

I was never sure whether we were supposed to see through Pietro's self-satisfied story and the dodgy nature of his relationship with an ex-student. And the idea of the dark secrets exchanged never really came to much (we never learn what the secrets are).

So is this a book about a toxic patriarchal male and the women who serve as his satellites? It can certainly be read in that way but that's hardly a new story. Issues of trust, marriage, ambition, love, reputation dip and out of the story but don't come to any productive fruition. Starnone's prose in this translation is clear and readable but I struggled to understand what this book was trying to do and say. That said, I'd certainly try Starnone again.

"Why is she so dissatisfied, I’m her husband, the father of her children, she should be happy about the impression I make: the better things go for me, the better off her life, and Emma’s, and Sergio’s, and that of the baby who’s about to arrive."

Trust has been translated by Jhumpa Lahiri (who also recently translated her own novel Whereabouts) from the original Italian Confidenza by Domenico Starnone. Her erudite translator's afterword was for me the strongest part of a book with which I otherwise failed to connect.

The bulk (75%) of Trust is narrated by Pietro, a teacher and latterly writer about teaching. This part is set in (I think) the 1970s and 1980s, ending when Pietro is around 40. He starts his story with an account of how he fell into a passionate relationship with one of his former students, Teresa, after she graduated from university (and Pietro would have been around 30). But after a crisis in their relationship, comes the novel's McGuffin:

"But now we were scared; we’d risked losing each other. And I think it was that fear that prompted us, right after that, to find a way to nail down our codependence for good. Teresa cautiously put forward a plan. She said: Let’s say I tell you a secret, something so awful that I’ve never even told it to myself, but then you have to confide something just as horrible to me, something that would destroy your life if anyone came to know it. She smiled, as if she were inviting me to play a game, but deep down she looked quite tense. He anxiety was contagious, I was stunned, I was concerned that, at only twenty-three years of age, she could already have a secret so very unmentionable. I, at thirty, had one, and it had to do with an affair so embarrassing that I blushed just thinking about it.
...
—Now you know something about me that no one else does.
—The same goes for you.
—We can never split up now, we’re really beholden to each other.
—Yes.
—Aren’t you happy?
—Yes.
—It was your idea.
—Of course.
—I’m crazy about you.
—Me too.
—So much.
—So so much. A few days later, without arguing, on the contrary, using courteous language that we’d never used before, we told each other that our affair had reached its natural end."

Teresa eventually moves to the US where she becomes a successful, even famous scientist. Meanwhile Pietro marries Nadia, a mathematician and fellow teacher, and a very different personality.

This first story takes us over the first decade or so of their marriage. Pietro finds some success as a writer of books, and seems to take it for granted his career, based on a rather flimsy essay making some rather obvious points on education, is somehow more important than his wife’s research in algebraic surfaces - the quote that opens my review is one of a number of such misogynistic musings.

Meanwhile, his emotional connection to Teresa, revolving around the mutual assured destruction of their respective secrets, continues.

The Second Story is the novel (around 15% of the book) an Third Story (10%) are both set around 40 years later, in the present day. The Second Story is narrated by Pietro's daughter, Emma, and the third by Teresa herself, both revolving around a presidential award for Pietro's services to education - Emma lobbies to have him chosen for the award and invites Teresa, as a former and now highly successful student, to make a speech praising Pietro - of course Pietro is worried the speech may turn out very different.

As I signalled earlier, I struggled to connect with this novel I'm afraid. In Pietro's own self-account he is highly successful, charismatic and attracts both female and male admirers, but that isn't how he comes across to this reader. If that were his own delusions, then this could be an interesting character study, but then Emma and even Teresa's accounts, far from exposing his lack of self-awareness, seem to reinforce this view. And the McGuffin at the heart of the novel seemed rather unconvincing to me - two 20-somethings telling each other a secret and then still feeling 50 years later that its revelation would shatter their life (to be fair Teresa does hint at the implausibility of this).

Reluctantly, as Starnone is a fine writer, 2 stars.

This brief novel is told in 3 stories narrated by the protagonist and two of the women in his life and explores the concept of trust - as a weapon, as an ideal, as both the same as and the opposite of fear. Quite a lot to think about here, what is said and left unsaid, “how easy it is for words to change the shape of things”.

I found the protagonist weakly written and not terribly engaging. I would have preferred the female characters to have been more fully developed as they played such important roles (and to be honest were more interesting than the protagonist).

The translator’s essay at the end of the book is a highlight.

Thank you to the publisher for the opportunity to review the ARC via Netgalley.

Domenico Starnone's "Trust" is a quizzical little book. The novel is almost compulsively readable--I read it in one headlong rush, laughing and cringing and sometimes even audibly gasping at parts.

Starnone's newest novel concerns Pietro Vella, a handsome, mild-mannered man who builds up a tenuous reputation as a minor public intellectual. What looms large over him, however, is the spectre of a secret pact he has made with a student and former lover, Teresa, to exchange their deepest, darkest single secret with one another. The point of this secret is to tie one to the other, irrevocably.

And so it does. The secret itself, mind you, is undisclosed. There are hints to it being of a prurient, sexual nature--I imagined some flavor of a sordid affair--but its contents are, ultimately, irrelevant. What matters is how the secret constitutes power, and alters the course of his life. It does bind him and Teresa together, though not in their romantic relationship, but in an "ethical marriage".

I found Starnone's novel a compelling portrait of mediocrity, sort of the anti-Elena-Ferrante novel if you will. If the Ferrante novels foreground remarkable women teetering on the knife's edge of brilliance and insanity, married to and beleaguered by difficult and ultimately pathetic men (the central revelation of a Ferrante novel almost always concerns the unveiling of a man's mediocrity), then Starnone's novel centers the man who beleaguers them, the mediocre man whom several brilliant, beautiful women devote their lives to propping up. The novel is a stark portrait of a very common sort of anxious every-man; charismatic, cool, and not particularly bad or evil. It is precisely the banality of this sort of man that makes the novella all the more compelling: this particular, potent combination of ambition, mediocrity, and male-ness has the casual power to smother all around it, and even when the man is hemmed in by the chains of his secret pact with Teresa.

Pietro's fear of the pathetic looms over him: fear of being found pathetic, of finding himself pathetic, of being found out as a fraud. None of these ever come to fruition; his reputation never falters. By the end of the novel, he is a desperately beloved man, but also forgotten, the sort of man who will be relegated to a footnote.

Starnone's novella was translated into English by Jhumpa Lahiri, and there is a wonderful exposition at the end of the book about Lahiri's theories on the novel; specifically, on the nature of the turn and various Italian conceptions of the turn (or, "reversal" is another term she uses).

Italian literary superstar Domenico Starnone gives us a psychological tale with a particularly twisted twist: Young teacher Pietro Vella enters a relationship with a former student, Teresa. They fight, they sleep with other people, they push each others buttons, and finally, they make a pact: Both tell each other their darkest secrets - soon after, they split up. Pietro starts a family, he goes on to become a respected author and critic of the educational system pointing out inequalities, while Teresa rises to fame as a scientist. But their paths cross again, and especially Pietro remains haunted by the knowledge he has passed on to Teresa and what she might do with it...

Split in three parts, the first and by far longest section of the novel is told by Pietro, and Starnone finds an elegant and subtle way to reveal the way this difficult character sees the world: Apparently about the same age as the author (who was born in 1943), Pietro does not perceive the power imbalance between him and his former pupil as problematic and he is not particularly supportive of his wife who could have made a career at a university; but at the same time, he is not a classic villain, as he, the first-generation university student, is plagued by self-doubt concerning his work and relationships. Teresa, the strong, independent woman, becomes a controlling factor simply through the truth she knows about him and the fact that he fears the world might hear it.

The second part is told by Pietro's daughter Emma, so we learn her perspective on her father, and, lastly, we hear from mighty Teresa herself. This change of perspectives opens the narrative to various sorts of deceptions: In how far do the characters betray each other, and, most importantly, themselves? Who are they, as perceived by themselves, who do they want to be to the world? The whole tale remains exciting to the very last page, even if I felt let down by the ending, as stringent and smart as it might be.

A wonderful little novel that shows how people are driven by what might happen, by secrets that threaten to destroy their construct of self: "Telling a story means lying, and the better the liar, the better the storyteller."

This was one for my international reading. Short and fairly well reviewed on GR, albeit all in Italian, it seems interesting enough, but alas, didn’t really work for me. I’m not sure if it’s the Italian thing, since Italian cinema’s pace often seems off to me too. But really it was more than mere pacing here, it was the overwhelming density of the writing, the characters that, while compelling in their own flawed ways, leave you unengaged, the precociousness of stylistic strokes that all but screams look how clever.
It wasn’t a terrible book by any means, it has some interesting observations about the nature of love, marriage, relationships with oneself and others, it had some nice language, it definitely had a style, though not one I liked. It just had a wrong kind of heaviness about it, like if going for a loaf of bread and grabbing a brick instead.
The basic plot is about the longtime ramifications of one affair between a young teacher and much younger girl he once taught. This might be difficult for the modern PC minded MeToo all too aware hyperwoke audiences, but within a book it seems perfectly natural and completely consensual The two have a passionate and torrid affair for a few years and then go their separate ways, though remain in each other’s lives tangentially. The novel mainly follows the teacher as he meets another woman, marries, has kids, gains some acclaim as a writer and all the while contemplates his own nature for he has a very clear idea of the kind of man he wishes to be and he works to become him. Kind of admirable in that way.
Then the novel pivots to decades later when the teacher’s adult daughter strives to get him recognized and awarded for his lifetime of work and reaches out to his former lover, who has also gains acclaim in science field, to come give a honorary speech. So in the end you get three perspectives on the same people. Which is nice, but just isn’t enough to elevate the book into something genuinely enjoyable and less soporifically plodding.
All in all, a laboriously overwritten, notably slow read for such a slim page count. In fact, the last 9% is a note from the translator, which for me as an amateur linguist was actually the most interesting thing about this book. The translator seems to think the author is some kind of a literary genius and judging by reviews she has company. Didn’t work for this reader, though, but international reading box checked. Thanks Netgalley.