This is a fine novel, translated from the Italian, about a man who leaves his wife and children for a graduate student twenty years his junior. Eventually he gives her up and goes back to them. In many stories this would be a story about a mistake that ends in redemption. TIES is the reverse. The affair is the redemption; and returning to the wife and small children is the mistake. The novel is set some thirty years after the affair, and we see how both husband and wife’s lives have been wasted; the one in staying in a relationship in which he is not truly interested; the other, in dishing out revenge on a daily basis for decades. Sometimes being happy takes courage.
Affairs are rarely positive in fiction, which is I think interesting. Does this reflect life? Or does this reflect a morality we wish applied to life? In any case, TIES is an unusual and very excellent upending of the traditional story. It made me wonder what is going on in Italian fiction. It reminded me of the remarkable Italian author Elena Ferrente, and her novel DAYS OF ABANDONMENT, which tells a similar story from the wife’s perspective (and very similar; Naples, elderly upstairs neighbour, smallish children). Then you guys I googled it and, Starnone and Ferrante are not just both Italian authors, and not just both from Naples, and not just both married, but they are married to each other. This somehow confounds me. What a strange joint literary project. I don’t know why, but I find it kind of sleazy.