The story of a troubling father-son relationship, I found this novel too long and repetitive. The father, Federi, is a want-to-be artist working for the railroad. He exaggerates his own importance and blames everyone for his failures. The novel was awarded the prestigious Italian award - Strega Prize. It is set in Naples and is semi- autobiographical. The cover art is a painting by the author’s father.

This is the powerful and compelling story of a narcissistic father and the son who spends his life trying to come to terms with him and escape from under his shadow. The narrator is Mimi, a writer, who revisits his past and remembers life with his working-class family in post-war 1960s Naples. The father Federi works on the railways but believes himself, with some justification, to be a great artist, thwarted by the demands of family life from achieving his true potential and the consequent national and international acclaim. Frustrated and resentful, he takes out his feelings on his family and those close to him, not often physically but certainly verbally and emotionally. A true narcissist, forever disappointed, resentful and angry, he’s a larger-than-life character who dominates his family and especially Mimi. He is in fact a good, if not a great artist, who probably hasn’t achieved what he might have done if circumstances had been different, so although he’s hardly likeable, it’s a nuanced portrait and the reader can’t help but have some sympathy for him, in spite of his obnoxious personality. The narration is fairly repetitive, I admit, as Federi lurches from one crisis to another, but personally I found this trajectory absorbing and almost mesmerising. It’s a very impressive work indeed and well worth the acclaim and prizes it has garnered. I very much enjoyed it.

Domenic Starnone - the author potentially outed as Elena Ferrante - has built a body of work as impressive as his (potential) alter-ego. This novel, an earlier work finally translated to English, shows that whether or not Starnone is behind the pseudonym of Ferrante, he deserves to be read as widely.

I DNF’d this title at 100 pages. I found it hard to get into the translation, I understood the narrator being so intrenched in his fathers thoughts that at times it feels like the story is coming from him but it made it hard to follow. I usually love Starnone when he’s translated by Jhumpa Lahiri, so perhaps my expectations were always gonna be high. The promise of a resentful father with a massive ego was something I looked forward to as I know Starnone can right these male characters really well but it was feeling pretty one note and I couldn’t take much more of Federi.

Unfortunately not many of Starnone’s novels have been translated into English. Out of the three which have, I have read Ties and Trick and in comparison this book is quite unlike the previous two. The earlier ones were slim and “clever”— a term I’m using in a positive manner—in a fairly obvious way. That is not to say that the current novel does not live up to the reputation of the earlier two. One tends to think that it is more conventional but it is very subtle and Starnone has evolved a unique structure to the novel. Several scenes are repeated over and over again with some new detail or some new angle which fleshes out the protagonist, Federi, his relationship with his wife Rusinè and her family whom he loathes, the artists who are his contemporaries many of whom seem to be doing better than he is, and of course, his sons, the eldest Mimi, the character through whose eyes we watch the entire action.

The setting is Naples during and after the war and the localities Starnone describes come alive teeming with absorbing characters and incidents. Federi is a very interesting character; he is a railroad worker and an artist and desperately wants to be recognised in the world of art and fulfil, what he believes is his destiny.

Since the novel is based on the adult Mimi’s recollection of his father while was growing up he tries to sift the chaff from the grain and arrive at the truth about his Federi. There are several contradictions in the memory which seems to play tricks. There is a palpable tension between father and son as seen form the first sentence. Mimi remembers his father hitting his mother quite often but the father says he hit his mother only once. Though Frederi sincerely believes the situations which he recreates in his mind, Mimi decides to challenge his father’s memories and desperately wants to find out what was true and what was invented. There are several versions which Frederi creates whereas the unstable narrator is relentlessly negative though there are flashes of sympathy and understanding. Just as the narrative is not chronological and often there are flashbacks and foreshadowing, the narrator himself is unreliable and oscillates from hatred to hero worship.


Federi has always felt that he has been destroyed by his family and particularly his wife’s family which has come in the way of his becoming a great painter. But one questions whether he is as talented as he professes to be or is this merely a coverup to divert the blame of his mediocrity to the members of his family. Though Federi constantly and repeatedly asserts this fact Mimi does not corroborate these statements. What the reader sees is that the family goes though much inconvenience to convert their bedroom into a studio and Mimi himself has to spend several hours in a very uncomfortable position carrying a of water in his hands as a model for of a paining called “The Drinkers.” A huge canvas is prepared from Rosina’s bed sheet and the bedroom is cleared of furniture the entire family which is uprooted tolerates this almost without a word. It is this painting that Mimi is in search of in the third section of the novel when he returns to Naples and revisits the haunts of his childhood

Federi is a multifaceted character who is impossible to pin down: he can be charming, bad tempered, confident, riddled with doubts and inferiority, crass and obscene, occasionally caring to his wife and family and often quite impervious to their needs.

There is no doubt that The House on Via Gemito deserved to be the winner of the Strega prize in 2001.
.

Having recently read Starnone's Ties, Tricks, and Trust, which are much sparer and fraught novellas, diving into Via Gemito was like being smacked again and again by a tsunami; the history of this family, of this father, Federi, and his mother Rusine, of Naples in the war and post-war years. of a man as a father, husband, but most importantly as an artist, fighting against everything with fists and words and screams and slaps, to get what he wants, to fulfill what he considers his destiny - to be a great and recognized artist, and what comes with that is personal mythmaking, considering himself a man destined for greatness, always moving forward when it does not fully or permanently find him. It's the eldest son, Mimi, for short, whose recollections these are, as he tries to understand who his father was, why he was as he was, the working of his parents' marriage, and, to a minor degree, himself. We learn little about him as an adult, on this trip back to Naples, taking himself to the apartments where they once lived, the train stations where his father worked, the shops, the hospital, etc., except he wants to exorcise his own feelings, wants to figure out what was true and what was confabulation so insistently practiced by his father. The rage leaps off the page, the stories repeated and repeated, in what is clearly at least a semi-autobiographical work. It is not a relaxing read, there is so much of it, and yet despite all his horrific traits, his self-absorption, I eventually found myself sympathizing and empathizing with Federi. To know what you should do with your life, to be hamstring by one's own choices, to have to battle - and lose - against corrupt practices, always being an outsider despite what is clear and great talent, it would be hard for most people not to simply give up. Here, his family became his punching bags, and this is a brutal and edifying portrait of this man in his time.