I read The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone

I was really impressed by how the novella Ties captured the multiple perspectives and slowly built up habits and resentments over time that make up the complexity of the family drama. This is, I think, considered Starnone's major work, and I also enjoyed it a lot, even though the family depicted here is almost completely different from the one in Ties.

While both sympathy and deceit (in the form of a naive or slightly self-aggrandizing narration) play a role in each section of Ties, the father figure in Gemito can seem much more cut-and-dried. His main constant is that he lies, constantly, almost compulsively, like about how many times he's hit his wife, of course, but also increasingly grandiose lies, like winning major arts prizes or fighting in World War II.

He also has this embattled streak, that the world is always conspiring against him and his genius, which closely mirrors the generalizations of "fascist psychology" that have been in the air again lately. It's kind of a book about what if Hitler was your dad, but permanently trapped in the foiled suffering artist phase. It's also kind of about how the position of "dad" itself always implies a sort of type of "hitler."

The novel follows Mimi (short for Domenico) on a sort of "bad proust" style journey in adulthood, after both of his parents have died, to try to untangle memories of his childhood to come to some definitive truth about his father-- what was the extent of his bullshit, exactly? These memories flow into each other associatively between family events preceding the narrator's birth to the death of his long-suffering mother Rusine in his teens, and occasionally hops forward into his present investigations.

The three long chapters or parts that make up the 450-page novel each culminate around a particular strong mental image from the narrator's childhood -- a brief vision of a peacock in his parents' room, posing as a boy pouring water for one of his fathers' paintings, and a fight between his parents following a group folk dance at a party. (Sidenote: in addition to peacocks which may or may not be there, Mimi, despite being a fairly confident atheist, also sees ghosts, which is not really commented on as particularly odd, a sort of banal speculative touch I really liked.) These are the things Mimi is sure of, but everything else is distorted by his father's stories and the imprecision of recall. Still, digging is painful and frequently unflattering to one's adult ego, and there may not even be a reward of "truth" at the end...

I'm fascinated by critiques of the nuclear family structure and all the implications of patriarchal power and naturalized exploitation of children that are maintained by it, and I think this novel gels with a lot of that theory. It captures, really movingly, the particular terror of childhood that comes from being disempowered and lacking a sense of ownership over yourself, in a context where most even literary depictions of childhood are mostly sentimental. The moments where Mimi is frustrated or disgusted by recognizing misogyny in how his father treats Rusine or other women, yet has trouble articulating what's wrong with it or how he should react are also interesting.

This is a really meaty novel that raises a lot of unsparing questions about family life and how it affects us into adulthood. Big recommend!!