A troubled marirage but rewarding book

What can we learn from a failing—failed—marriage?

A great deal when the tensions and stresses and cracks are as clearly explicated at they are in Domenico Starone's short novel, Ties, translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri.

When the novel begins, Aldo and Vanda in their early 30s have been married for a dozen years. They have two children, Sandro and Anna, and live comfortably enough in Naples. Aldo commutes weekly to his job as an academic/writer/television personality in Rome.

Where Aldo has fallen in love with and is sleeping with a delightful, sexy, nineteen-year-old, Lidia, who accepts him as he is—married with children.

Section I of Ties is a series of letters Vanda writes to Aldo in growing fury and desperation in her attempts to shame him (?), encourage him (?), threaten him (?) to abandon Lidia, to return to the marriage bed, to the family. The novel begins, "In case it's slipped your mind, Dear Sir, let me remind you: I am your wife. I know that this once pleased you and that now, suddenly, it chafes. I know you pretend that I don't exist, and that I never existed because you don't want to look bad in front of the highbrow people you frequent  . . ."

In Section II, forty years after Aldo has returned to Vanda, he reflects on the period when the letters were written: "I certainly didn't hate my wife, I hadn't built up any resentment toward her, I loved her. I'd thought it was pleasantly adventurous to get married when I was so young, before graduating, without a job. I'd felt I was cutting away my father's hold over me and that I was finally in charge of my own life . . . "

It is difficult to write about Ties because part of the pleasure is the book's structure, the way each section grows out of the one before, the way every detail adds to the story and I don't want to give anything away. In her Introduction, Lahiri writes: "The entire structure of this novel, in fact, seems to me a series of Chinese boxes, one element of the plot discretely and impeccably nestled within the next. There is no hole in the construction, no fissure. No detail has escaped the author's attention, like the home of Aldo and Vanda . . . everything is in place neat as a pin."

Until it's not.

It seems to me that, although Ties is set in contemporary Italy, the story is not uncommon, almost banal: two young people marry, have children, and grow apart so that by their thirties they are dissatisfied with their spouses, their children, their lives, or all three and are vulnerable to a new, more fulfilling love. The issue is then what do they do about it? Starone has one answer that conveys not only the troubled marriage but also suggests with literary art and craft the consequences.

Aldo and Vanda may have had a troubled marriage, but Ties is a rewarding novel.

Why not write in your native language?

Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for her best-selling short story collection The Interpreter of Maladies (1999). She followed up with two novels, The Namesake (2003) and The Lowland (2013) and another short story collection Unaccustomed Earth (2008). She has now published a memoir, In Other Words.

Although Lahiri's parents immigrated from Bengal and spoke Bengali at home, they arrived in the US when Jhumpa was young enough that English is her native language and she wrote her stories and novels in exquisite English. In what sounds like her twenties, however, she fell in love with Italian. "When you're in love, you want to live forever. You want the emotion, the excitement you feel to last. Reading in Italian arouses a similar feeling in me. I don't want to die, because my death would mean the end of my discovery of the language. Because every day there will be a new word to learn. Thus true love can represent eternity." And after spending 20 years struggling to learn Italian, she moved her husband and children to Rome so that she could learn enough to write in Italian. She wrote In Other Words in Italian; it was translated into English by Ann Goldstein. The Italian and the English are on facing pages.

I am fascinated by Lahiri's story because (a) I too am in love with Italian and have been studying it for almost 20 years; (b) I am also in love with Japanese and am currently translating—with the considerable help of a native speaker—a book of contemporary Japanese short stories into English. So I spend a lot of time thinking about English, Japanese, and Italian.

I began studying Japanese because it seemed to me we think in a language and our language forces us in many ways to have a certain view of reality. For example, there are no words "brother" or "sister" in Japanese; there are only the words "older brother," "younger brother," "older sister," "younger sister." To speak of your sibling you have to define your relationship. Similarly in Italian, there is only one word for "grandson," "granddaughter," "grandchild," "neice," "and "nephew" (nipote). You need more words to covey the relationship and gender of your relative. Lahiri quotes a friend, Dominico Starone, who wrote, "A new language is almost a new life, grammar and syntax recast you, you slip into another logic and another sensibility."

Tim Parks in his review of In Other Words in The New York Review of Books writes, "I can think of no other book set in Italy that has less of the color and drama of Italy in it. Not a single figure emerges. Not a dialogue of any note. Not a single situation characteristic of Italy. Even the language is there only as a challenge."

Moreover, the translation does Lahiri few favors. "When translated," Parks writes about Lahiri's Italian, "this strangeness [in syntax and word choice] disappears, since such structures and word choices are standard in English. Instead, where Lahiri has deployed Italian idioms and rhetorical strategies, Goldstein follows her usual habit of bringing them more or less word for word into English, so that the strangeness of the English text is that of so many translations where what was ordinary in the original becomes quaint and off-key in translation."

Nevertheless (or because of the translation), In Other Words sounds like a book I should study.