Review: "Ties" by Domenico Starnone

Ties, a simple title for a simple novel by Italian writer Domenico Starnone (translated by Pulitzer Prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri), might be one of my favorite books on a crumbling marriage, or at least my favorite one for quite some time. And like its title, its quality lies in its simplicity. At 150 pages (the first 25 of which are dedicated to a worthwhile introduction from Lahiri), there is not an ounce of fat on this slim novel, making for an engaging look into the lives of a married couple whose lives began to crumble after the man is led astray by a younger woman. What I feel sets this part from other novels and what stops this from becoming shallow melodrama is the way the incident and what comes after it is presented and what this implies about the lives of the man and the woman and their two children, a son and a daughter. It offers a very unique perspective on infidelity, one that puts the discretion in question in the context of the time period (the book is set in the present day, but the actions in question took place in the mid-1970’s) as well as the context of each of their personal happiness. The slim book is separated into three sections. The first section, which is only about 15 pages long, is a series of letters Vanda is writing to her husband Aldo. It is made pretty clear within the first letter what Vanda is so angry about: Aldo has left her and their two kids, Sandro and Anna to go live with a younger woman, Lidia, who happens to be his student. While I find this section to be the weakest of the three, it acts as a strong opening as Vanda describes how her life fell apart after Aldo left her, leading her to try to end her life. The next section and the books longest is split up into three chapters. The first chapter takes place in the present day, where Aldo and Vanda, now in their seventies, come home from a vacation to find their house ransacked their cat, Labes, missing. Late at night he goes into his study and finds the letters from the beginning. We see the rather mundane circumstances that led to his affair and, more importantly, the mundane but deeply metaphorical reason he came back into their lives in the second chapter. The third chapter leaves us in a state of terrifying ambiguity, as Aldo, now a man easily duped, lets into his house what may or may not be people with ill intentions. The last section lays out cynically the ill effects Aldo and Vanda’s relationship has on others and as well as what happened to their house and cat. None of the actions of the people here are presented with passion: they are boring people who are trying to gain any type of happiness they can, and the book details eloquently how those plans fail and for better or worse, they are tied to people they need but might not like. For a short novel, this packs a wallop that you won’t soon heal from. 
Rating: 5/5