Myth’s Objects

Brianna Di Monda reviews Domenico Starnone’s “The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan.”

By Brianna Di MondaNovember 3, 2024

• Fiction

GIVEN THE CHANCE for a grand demonstration of his love, how could Orpheus screw up such a straightforward task? The answer might be simple: all he wanted was one last glimpse of Eurydice. But to resurrect the dead? The myth of Alcestis tells us not to meddle with life and death; so, too, do the stories of Lazarus and Frankenstein, even Pet Sematary and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Perhaps Orpheus’s decision to turn around isn’t so shocking.

Domenico Starnone’s latest book to be released in English, The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan (published in Italian in 2021 and now translated by Oonagh Stransky), takes up the influence of this myth on a young boy in Naples named Mimí, who sees himself in Orpheus. As a child, he watches from the kitchen window as the titular girl from Milan dances on her balcony. He resolves that, should the girl fall to her death, he would go to the underworld and rescue her. Since he grew up speaking the Neapolitan dialect at home, he is desperate to join the ranks of the great poets he reads in class. “The idea of committing my life to this labor of love and how it would elevate me to the status of unrivaled poet moved me deeply,” he recalls.

The mysterious, unreachable girl from Milan is contrasted with Mimí’s grandmother, whom he disdains despite her devotion to him. “I don’t think I even loved her that much,” he admits. Her lack of education and her old age cannot compare to the beautiful, eloquent girl. He even thinks, when he learns of the pit of the dead, that his grandmother should be put there, “since she was a hard worker and therefore better suited to slogging away in the darkness.” He resents his lower-middle-class background, which has cursed him with an inelegant grasp of Italian; his spelling and grammar mistakes are corrected by everyone from his teachers to the mailman.

Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1957) calls the fascination with myth a “mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature.” The language of everyday myth allows people to “take other men as objects, to describe and condemn at one stroke.” The girl from Milan and Mimí’s grandmother both start as flattened figures: the beautiful virgin, the widowed hag; one a girl waiting to be seduced, the other a woman treated “like a piece of furniture.” To paraphrase Barthes, these depictions do not bother with their consciousness. Without considering the implications of his actions, the young Mimí only understands these women through the myths he reads in class, a psychology that presupposes them as objects.

Like Eurydice, the girl from Milan dies, and the boy (in a quintessentially Starnone line) says, “My reaction to the news was excessive.” He faints. He has a run of fevers that lasts for months. He begins to write a new series of poems about “the desire to perish before the failures and delusions of life led to [his] inevitable deterioration.” Her death provides the impetus for his artistic growth and increasing distance from his own family. Years go by. He forgets words in dialect as his Italian improves. At the same time, his relationship with his grandmother deteriorates: she stops telling him stories and talking to him about her feelings.

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Starnone has repeatedly written about men who have crossed class boundaries through successful careers: in Trick (2016), an accomplished but aging illustrator babysits his spoiled grandson; the couple in Ties (2014) ascends to Italy’s upper class through the husband’s work as a professor; Trust (2019) follows a writer afraid his ex-girlfriend will reveal his childhood secret at an award ceremony; The House on Via Gemito (2000) is an autofictional story of the writer’s abusive father and their impoverished family in Naples. In Girl from Milan, the boy’s grand ambitions to be a writer are the seeds of a common theme. This slim novel represents Starnone at his best, and I don’t mean to mislead—his books are too complex to be reduced to any one theme. You could say they have mythological reverberations. At the same time, they appear quietly rooted in an autobiography that lends them uncanny intimacy. I can even imagine Starnone’s novels comprising a single series: the story we read about here could easily be the narrator’s secret in Trust.

Starnone is one of the best contemporary writers documenting the passage from one class to another, and he does so with a style and syntax strikingly similar to Elena Ferrante’s. The two authors share the same English-language publisher, Europa Editions, and tell “stories of similar families, set in a context that is the fruit of their common experiences in Naples and of a precise period in history.” And yet, when The New York Times published their list of “the 100 best books of the 21st century,” Ferrante had three titles represented while Starnone had none. At least in English, Starnone has not sold nearly as many books nor received the same degree of critical praise (two iffy, if useful, measures of success).

To be fair, “Ferrante Fever” in the United States reached unique heights for almost any author. Ferrante also tells stories of motherhood and female friendship layered over class dramas, and her portrayal of the psychology of women plays no small part in her popularity; at least for now, readers are simply less interested in Starnone’s preoccupation with male hubris, ambition, and strife. If I compare the two—and the comparisons are rife—Ferrante’s books are more consistent in quality. But Starnone’s relative lack of fame in the Anglophone world is a striking underappreciation of a major author.

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In his papyrology class, Mimí learns about an Epicurean whose words had been preserved in lava stone for centuries. During this lesson, the girl from Milan—who had long since become a “faded specter”—returns to his mind: “I realized that the girl and her voice existed inside my head like some charred papyrus that a machine—some eighteenth-century contraption—was delicately unrolling, restoring to me the story of my tumultuous first love.” We’ve seen how an ancient way of understanding the world has always resonated with Mimí: so begins, he declares, her immortal life, and he writes her into history alongside the Greeks. Mimí acknowledges that this is a dramatic way to put it (another very Starnone line), since the word “mortal” is out of fashion these days. We no longer believe in immortality.

Yet she has an immortal life, one that assumes a mythic stature as Mimí continues to associate her with Eurydice. We find out that the story we’re reading is a relatively faithful transcription of a series of oral interactions from Mimí’s life, now being retold through Mimí’s point of view. In this way, the form of the book is also playing with the boundaries of myth. Matthew Spellberg, in a 2019 essay in The Yale Review, put it well:

Though myth often lives on in literate societies, it does not originate within them. Myth is (as the poet and translator Robert Bringhurst says) an “ecology” of stories, circulating from the mouths of many tellers, told night after night, in a place where there is no fixed canon, no sacred book against which any individual story is measured or judged.

Although our narrator, thanks to his education, is able to write down the myth of the girl from Milan, it started as a story exchanged between a nearly illiterate boy and his Neapolitan grandmother.

Mimí becomes anxious about preserving people’s memories in writing and not being able to capture what really happened or how they once spoke. Even the spelling of eternity, “eterno,” once had two t’s—“etterno”: words have a mortal and immortal life. “Language disintegrates,” he declares. This is disorienting for him as someone who writes stories of love and loss. If, as he believes, immortality is “the function of literature,” then how could the stories themselves be lost? As the book retells the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, it also plays with a problem inherent in myth: in Spellberg’s view, myth implies “an ur-form, an original story, an ideal template behind later iterations.” The Orpheus story, just like the myth of the girl from Milan, was born of an oral tradition. Just as there is no original Orpheus story, so there is no original myth of the girl from Milan. Of course not—the original myth is the life that was lived.

This is further complicated by the relationship between the Neapolitan dialect and Italian. Much as the book interjects phrases in dialect, the story we read is a shadow of Mimí’s encounters with his grandmother and friends, translated into Italian in order to be legible to a wider audience. It is not the absolute truth; the true text would be a twisted fusion of the two linguistic forms, impossible for anyone beyond their Neapolitan community to read. To preserve the memory of his grandmother, Mimí had to leave her behind and assimilate perfectly into the Italian language—the language for school essays, for literature. “I can still remember each and every word she said,” Mimí writes of his grandmother. But the language of the great poets is not the language she spoke. We only know the false language.

My own family emigrated from Naples to Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, where three generations lived in one apartment. When my dad and his sister spoke Italian, they would be hit with wooden spoons. Leave the language behind, they were told, and become Americans. It was a point of pride that they could speak English better than their grandparents, that my dad got into Brooklyn Tech and was the second in his family (after a cousin) to go to community college. This fall, I was on writing residency in Lazio, where I learned enough broken Italian to tell the locals—who repeatedly stated that I did not “look American enough”—about my heritage. When they tried to hold a longer conversation in Italian, I confessed to only the most rudimentary understanding of the language. They asked why I don’t speak Italian. I grimaced. “It’s not hereditary,” I said. Of course, I’ve translated this interaction into English, so this isn’t exactly what was said. What I’m trying to say is, I sympathize with Mimí’s linguistic hang-ups.

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For a project in university, Mimí must fill out 500 index cards in phonetic writing, each one dedicated to a different word in Neapolitan dialect. He eventually realizes—it does not immediately come to him—that he can just ask his grandmother for the words. They go for hours, days, weeks: votapésce, pirciatélli, appesesacícciə, muníglə. To make a good impression, she pronounces words incorrectly by articulating every syllable, even though, in dialect, “final vowel sounds got dropped and faded into an indistinct sound.” Mimí recognizes himself in her error: when he is tense or anxious, he still drops the final vowel in Italian. The two of them, he sees, are “equally uncomfortable with both dialect and Italian.” To return to Barthes: Mimí sees himself as a potentially mythological object, endowed with a meaning he never intended, humiliated by signifiers he had no control in making. This language, with its power to condemn, disintegrated his bond with his grandmother—until the words start pouring out of her:

Her tone grew richer, the volume of her voice increased, her ardor grew such that in her eyes I saw other eyes, her gestures were those of other people, her mouth was composed of other mouths, in her words were endless words belonging to other people, her voice so dysregulated that no tool could ever record it, much less the act of writing.

After she spent so long mute, ashamed, alone, Mimí finally sees: it is not the girl from Milan he will never be able to record but his grandmother that cannot be captured, stifled, cummiglià, in language.

By the time he writes this book, Mimí no longer desires to rival the great poets. He wants only to capture his grandmother’s “linguistic elegance” as best he can. The book is, in the end, the myth of Mimí and his grandmother, for whom he descended to the pit of the dead, not to pull her back up but to offer his last glimpse. Like any good myth, the feeling it leaves is this: while it tells a universal tale of rediscovering one’s family, it could not have happened to any other person, in any other setting.