In The New York Times Book Review, Rachel Donadio reviews Domenico Starnone’s “Ties,” a novel translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri. Donadio writes:
Domenico Starnone, husband of the woman who has been identified as Elena Ferrante. Credit Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images
Starnone happens to be married to Anita Raja, the literary translator who was identified as Elena Ferrante last fall in a report — effectively an unmasking — by the Italian investigative journalist Claudio Gatti that provoked fury among many of the author’s fans, who didn’t want to know. . . . But in literature, unlike investigative reporting, the telling is more important than the takeaway. “Ties” responds to Ferrante’s 2002 novel “The Days of Abandonment” — the second book published under the name of Elena Ferrante, after “Troubling Love” 10 years earlier — and turns it inside out. The books share the same universal plot: A man leaves his wife and children for a younger woman. But the two authors take the story in different directions, and have different prose styles. “Ties” is in some ways a sequel to “The Days of Abandonment,” in other ways an interlocking puzzle piece or another voice in a larger conversation.
On this week’s podcast, Starnone and Lahiri talk about “Ties”; Mary Otto discusses “Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America”; Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Parul Sehgal, Gregory Cowles and John Williams on what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.
