Trick, Domenico Starnone

(Translated from Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri)

Daniele Mallarico's comfortable solitude is broken one day by a phone call.

His daughter, Betta, has called to ask for a favour. She wants him to move to Naples for a few days to babysit her son, Mario, while she and her husband go out of town to attend a conference.

Daniele is befuddled. He's 75 years old, an artist, illustrator and loner by choice. After his wife's passing, he's turned his back on the world, with only his art for company.

But he knows things are difficult. He hasn't been the ideal father. Or grandfather. Now he has a chance to make amends.

Four days with a four-year-old. How hard can it be?

It started well, Daniele would say. Mario is overjoyed by the return of the prodigal grandfather, and smothers him with hugs and kisses. But soon they are marooned in a high-rising Neapolitan apartment, and cracks start to appear.

Mario is a boisterous child who has just heard the pistol of life fire, and must run as fast as his little legs can carry him. Daniele, on the other hand, is a tiring maestro trudging along the last lap of the marathon, the finish line not too far away. But that line is a blur now, blurred by the primordial bundle of energy that is Mario.

Like most maverick artists, Daniele is an egotist — the Goliath of the world he inhabits. Now he's face to face with a pint-sized, precocious David in Mario. And more than anything, they seem to be two sides of the same infernal coin.

Thus, isolated from the rest of the world, grandfather and grandson match wits over the course of four days. To survive, one of them must knock down the other. Who will be the first to blink?

To read Domenico Starnone is to witness a master puppeteer in action. You can see his words sway and unfurl in mad merriment. You can watch his narrative vacillate seamlessly between scathing dialogue and intense meditation.

Starnone must be grateful to Jhumpa Lahiri for rendering the prose in all its savage beauty. Jhumpa Lahiri is a master in her own right, and one of the reasons why I was drawn to this book in the first place.

Needless to say, translation is a hell of a task. A work in translation must strive to be the moon that will faithfully reflect the brilliance and radiance of the sun. Some of the magic is often lost in translation.

But Jhumpa Lahiri is no ordinary moongazer, mind you.

She is the Mario to Starnone’s Daniele.