I loved this book and was enthralled with the writing. I loved the character study. Would read more from the author!

A charming and moving exploration of childhood innocence, of grandmaternal love and of childhood friendships. There is nothing flashy going on here, but everyone will recognise a little bit of themselves in the story and appreciate the fine balance between childhood wonder and the cynical realities of adulthood. A small gem of a book.

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this title.)

3.5 Stars

This is a quiet, reflective novel; although it’s a genre I usually enjoy, I sometimes found myself losing interest while reading this book, a translation from Italian.

An elderly man looks back at his youth, beginning with a pivotal event when he is 8 years old in the early 1950s in Naples. He sees a black-haired girl dancing on a balcony across from his and falls in love. An imaginative child, he daydreams about being her hero, fighting duels and even rescuing her from death. Only later does he realize that what he remembers may not truly reflect the reality of what happened to his first love.

I appreciated the novel’s portrayal of the thoughts and emotions of a young boy. It feels so authentic. He longs for a dramatic life and death so romanticizes everything. He dreams of “perishing heroically” but “if I got a scratch or felt pain or saw blood, then life was intolerable, and even worse if accompanied by a few humiliating sniffles and tears.” His infatuation for the girl is not an ordinary infatuation but a life-or-death infatuation. Even in early adulthood, his aspirations are not just about succeeding in life: he aspires to acquire immortality through his writing.

What the book emphasizes is the difference between his romanticized love for the girl and the very real, unconditional love of his grandmother. The girl is beautiful and speaks proper Italian whereas his grandmother is ugly and speaks a rough Neapolitan dialect. He focuses on loving the distant and idealized love object instead of the ever-present, tender and attentive grandmother. He sometimes appreciates what his grandmother does for him but, “To tell the truth, underneath it all, I don’t think I even loved her that much.”

A university exam on glottology, the history of language, forces the protagonist to pay attention to his grandmother’s dialect. He realizes that language constantly changes and can never truly capture what one is trying to express: “marks and signs are constitutionally inadequate, fluctuating merely between what you try to say and pure dismay.” He decides to write “without ever caring about approval, or truth, or lies, or raising issues or sowing the seeds of hope, or how long something might endure, or immortality or any of the rest of it.”

Of course it is not just language that changes. Nothing lasts forever. Eventually, the narrator confronts his childish delusions and prejudices. His grandmother changed from a beautiful young woman to an old, stooped woman, but we are all a “mass of living and decaying matter.” A favourite quotation from the book is the comment, “’We spend half of our life studying the mortal remains of others and the other half creating mortal remains of our own.’”

At 144 pages, this is a short novel but it gets bogged down occasionally with long paragraphs about linguistics. While describing his first-year university studies, the narrator goes on and on about topics such as toponyms, changes in spellings of words, phonetic writing, and “how phonemes are classified.” This book was written in Italian and its intended audience is Italians who have some familiarity with different regional dialects and how they differ from standard Italian. Not being one of those people, my interest waned. What am I to make of this: cchitaratoperméss, eh, mestaifacènnascípazz, taggiocercatadapertútt, macómm, tujescecàsasènzadicereniént, moverímmoquannetòrnanomammepapà, moverímm?


This book contrasts reality and fantasy, familial and romantic love, and old age and youth. Much of it resonates. However, the information dumps become tedious.

This book did not live up to my expectations. I was intrigued by the title and cover design, but the charm of this story eluded me. The narrator is a rather obsessive Neapolitan boy, in love with a neighbor girl in the early 1950's, and dreaming always of achieving heroic greatness. The divide between north and south in Italy encompasses culture, status, and linguistics; and to convey these nuances to a foreign audience in another language is an incredibly lofty challenge, so kudos to author Domenico Starnone and translator Oonagh Stransky for making the effort.

I studied Italian all through Covid lockdown, and passed the livello b1 Italiano per cittadinanza exam, but still I was completely perplexed by the regional accent that was a major component of this plot. Despite my interest in the country and its culture, and perhaps due to the fact that I'm divorcing someone of Italian extraction, I found this boy's constant egotism and disdain for his supposed loved ones off-putting.

Thank you to the author, Europa Editions and NetGalley, for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This novella reads like a stream of consciousness from an old man remembering the distant lands of his childhood. Looking back, he remembers his first infatuation with a little girl in the apartment building opposite, and his efforts to win her favor. Lots of references are included to lost loves in literature, throughout the book. At the same time, the narrative is constantly underpinned by his close relationship with his grandmother, who tells him stories of superstitions and the underworld. Their bond is close, particularly on the language front, as he decides to study (no longer a child) linguistics at university. This is the final point where the book lost me - so much is dependent on their shared language, much of which is not translated. However, I also found it difficult to swallow the fact that the innocent selfishness of a child carried over without a hitch to a monstrously entitled adult. Overall, not a fan.

After reading many, many glowing reviews of The House on Gemito a couple of years ago, I picked it up, not realizing that I would be forever ruined by the way Domenico Starnone writes about family and legacy. Since then, I have read several pieces of Italian fiction and I realize that there is a careful, measured quality to the way Italian authors create their cast of characters. The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan is another beautiful example of that perfect prose and fully fleshed out characters.

For fans of Elsa Morante and Donna Tartt, Domenico Starnone has written a gem of a book worth diving straight into.

A boy sits in the window of his family’s apartment and watches a girl dance on the ledge of hers, across the way. A pivotal memory for young Mímí, as he falls in love with her for a brief time in their childhood. She dies tragically, and he is left with her memory, a memory that links him to his grandmother, a woman who watched it all.

This is a sweet story, for all the sadness and existential grappling in it. Starnone is an excellent writer, and Stransky again translates beautifully. I was swept into the story and find myself turning over the details again and again.

This was a pleasant enough read, quite charming in its way, but I wasn’t as blown away by it as many other readers have been. It’s the coming-of-age story of a boy from Naples who falls in love with a little girl in the opposite apartment whom he sees dancing on her balcony. Now an old man, he looks back on this first romance and the sense of loss that has haunted him all his life. For one day the “girl from Milan” moved away and he never saw her again. There are many references throughout the book to other tales of lost loves – from Orpheus to Dante to Petrarch – and the novel conveys with empathy and insight just how formative these first loves can be. Reflecting on love, desire, loss, ageing, family and memory, with a strong sense of time and place, it’s a short but poignant exploration of the power of the past, but overall it was just an ok read for me.

This was a beautifully written novel that drew me in from the first pages.A-book of life mixed in with mythology and poetry a gem of a novel.#netgalley #europa

At first glance this feels like a charming coming of age tale as the narrator, now in old age, looks back at his childhood love for 'the girl from Milan' and his first actual love affair at university. But the mythical and literary resonances are close to the surface and name-checked in the text: Orpheus and Eurydice, Proust's madeleine, Petrarch and the <i>rime sparse</i>.

And so what this really seems to be about is the confluence of love and writing; or love as the instigator of poetic practice and the literary project. For Orpheus is not just the passionate lover who goes into the underworld to bring back his dead wife but is also the poet whose song lives on after his death (in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Orpheus' head continues to sing). Proust's madeleine doesn't just allow him to recall his past life but to kick-start his vast novelisation of that life. Petrarch (and the many sonneteers who follow him) isn't just a man devoted, however chastely, to the idealised Laura but is himself an Apollo figure where Laura is also the laurel wreath which he pursues as an image of supreme artistry - he was actually crowned poet laureate in 1341.

Starnone, then, is inserting himself into this long line of masculine authors whose artistic inspiration and whose pursuit of literary honours is itself figured as a search or quest for an elusive female - and that gendering in my description is deliberate.

There's an easy clarity to the writing and a wry sense of humour that makes this enjoyable. And the end-point, not surprisingly, is death which brings the artistic enterprise to an end. This is interesting to me as an unexpected reception of the mythology of masculine artistic performance that gives cultural depth to what may seem a cute coming of age tale.

Thanks to NetGalley and Europa Editions for this advance reader copy, in exchange for an honest review. The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan is a short, sharp novel that reminisces about the narrator’s childhood love for the beautiful girl who dances gracefully on the balcony across from his. This book, in short, captures a perfect slice of childhood adolescence, with the discovery of a first crush and all of the strong emotions and actions that come with it.

I’ve never read this author’s work before but, was intrigued to see it compared to Elena Ferrante’s and it did not disappoint. As I was reading this book, I thought to myself multiple times how much I enjoyed the voice of narration throughout this text— when the narrator was describing his thoughts/feelings/actions as a kid, it felt so authentic and this remained true throughout subsequent phases of his life. The romanticized, dramatic, life or death nature of his infatuation with “the girl from Milan” felt so reminiscent of childhood crushes and I appreciated how much the author built this up, in such a way where it made sense that her character had a lasting impact on the narrator. The connection and parallels between the narrators relationship with his grandmother and his fascination with the “girl from Milan” were also interesting and played off of each other well in the story. I thought it was extremely well done how this carried throughout the text and also how some of the narrator’s characteristic interests, such as mythology and grandiose stories, were exhibited by the narrator as he grew up.

Ultimately, this was a beautiful story that I would definitely recommend to fans of Ferrante or other modern Italian literature, or even just contemporary literary fiction fans. There is a lot to be enjoyed within this short novel and I look forward to seeing what others think of this text once the translated version is published this fall!

Some childhood encounters loom large far into our adult life. For our narrator, “the girl from Milan” lingers in his memory even as he grows up and moves away. She doesn’t speak the language of his family but expresses herself in beautiful Italian, and to him, she is the opposite of his grandmother, who uses only Neapolitan dialect, artfully reproduced in the translation.

These snippets of dialect accentuate the strangeness and the difficult teetering balance between “proper” Italian and the dialect which is spoken by the ordinary people. This is an alien concept to those of us who grew up only speaking English. Italian dialects can be very different from the ‘proper’ Italian that is taught in school, and hard to understand if you are not from that area. In this book, language separates people as well as connecting them, and the narrator comes to confront his own prejudices and understanding of his past. Starnone also expresses the paradox of language: the slippery nature of words, which rarely express exactly what we feel or want to say, and yet are one of the few means we have of leaving a mark, a record of what we think and which can give us great pleasure to use.

With references to the myth of Odysseus, and a wonderful grandmother who dotes on him, this is a Bildungsroman with a strong sense of place and language. It will be enjoyed by fans of Elena Ferrante, Elizabeth Strout and Knausgaard, who appreciate an intricate and reflective style of storytelling.

We open with Mimi who is a 7 year old boy living in Naples. Across apartment buildings, he sees a girl practising ballet precariously on a balcony and he falls in love, despite never having properly spoken to her. His friend tells him that she is from Milan, hence the title.

The novel is narrated by Mimi as an old man, and the narrative is split into two main parts: Mimi as a child and Mimi as a younger teenager and then an older teenager at university.

I found the younger Mimi an extremely likeable character. He romanticises his life through a filter of mythology and magical stories. For example, convinced the girl from Milan will fall from her balcony, he finds what he believes to be the opening to the underworld in his neighbourhood, with the idea that he will save her from the underworld like in Orpheus and Eurydice. There are some brilliant, funny lines in this section of the book, for example: ‘While the thought of her death was intolerable, the prospect of to the underworld to bring her back was very appealing.’

However, this book also deals with very real and awkward emotions. In particular, the descriptions of childhood flirting and wondering if your crush is looking over at you while you’re playing were really nostalgic and evocative, as is Mimi’s complex but also touching relationship with his grandmother.

As Mimi gets older, he loses his love-affair with myths and storytelling and I think Starnone does a really good job of describing that transition between pre-teen and teen that can happen. I used to be a teacher and I remember seeing younger students who were obsessed with stories and didn’t mind being the weird kids suddenly get a bit grumpy and more self-conscious. It’s a part of life, and this period is treated very sensitively - most people would relate. Mimi begins seeing the world through myths and imagination again when he goes to university and studies Papyrology and Glottology – apart from now, because he’s older, people seem less inclined to humour him.

I loved this book: it spoke to me in many ways. I thought the way that humans express or internalise life’s difficulties by imagining some secret myth or narrative is presented in a very accessible and believable manner. The way perspective is treated – especially when a long held belief about something having happened in a particular way is shattered – is at times funny, sometimes uncomfortable, and also tragic.

It also touches upon etymology (which is one of my favourite things) and I was really interested to learn more about the Neapolitan dialect compared to standard Italian and how it’s very much tied to the idea of identity.

If you like Elena Ferrante, in particular 'The Lying Life of Adults', I think you’ll enjoy this as much as me!

Link to review on TokTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@randleauthor/video/7393353153975962912?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7391941396736968197

Amazon.ca says it is not yet available to accept reviews, but I will post this same review there when it opens.

A beautiful story of life and death and rebirth and experiencing it all through the eyes of a child. It’s so nostalgic.

It seems cliché, or lazy, to tie together two authors from the same country, whose work is translated from the same language, but there is no doubt that Domenico Starnone's novel shares an uncanny similarity with those of Elena Ferrante: much like the Neapolitan quartet, The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan is set against the backdrop of childhood, rich with the imaginative pursuits of youth - love and loss, friendships and conflicts, family ties and the search for an individual, autonomous self. Starnone's prose is taught and sharp and sparse, marked at the same time with atmospheric descriptions of place and character, and his protagonists - in their dialogue, in their personalities, in their relationships to themselves and one another - feel real and authentic. Although short, the novel packs enough in its 200-odd pages to make its climactic twist feel momentous, blindsiding both its narrator and its reader, and the explorations of memory and time are expertly sketched out.

The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan was a short but poignant read in which the young narrator experiencing first love and first loss. I was caught up in the story and characters, which all felt realistic and compelling. The weaving of myth and poetry throughout the novella worked really well, adding a subtle weight to the events taking place. It was a quick but memorable read and I would certainly pick up other works by this author in the future. I am giving it four stars.

This was a unique read. I wasn’t sure if it was going to be for me, but I was pleasantly surprised. I thoroughly enjoyed it and definitely recommend it.