National Book Award for Translated Literature
Trick
Aging illustrator Daniele is asked by his daughter and son-in-law to look after his young grandson Mario in a Naples apartment. Inside the enclosed home, the battle of wits between grandfather and child exposes aging, artistic anxiety, family memory, and the need to reckon with the past.
Work Information
A few days of confrontation between grandfather and grandson sharply illuminate age, art, and family shadows.
Trick is Jhumpa Lahiri's English translation of the Italian novel Scherzetto. Daniele, an illustrator who senses his reputation fading, is forced to face his grandson Mario in an old Naples apartment, where the child's innocence and cruelty unsettle him. No Japanese standalone edition was confirmed, so the work is available in English translation or in the original Italian.
Review Summaries
-
Critical and publisher response values how the chamber-drama structure turns the contest between grandfather and grandson into a study of aging and creative insecurity. Despite the playful title, the emotional layers are dense.
-
Bookseller response emphasizes the tension that keeps the novel from feeling like an ordinary family story, as well as the appeal of its psychological drama against the presence of Naples.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Europa Editions
- Published
- 2018-03-06
- Pages
- 176 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.46 x 2.03 x 20.83 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781609454449
- ISBN-10
- 1609454448
- Price
- 2393 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Genre Fiction/Family Saga
A weary man faces the ghosts of his past while caring for his grandson in Naples in this National Book Award finalist novel by the acclaimed author of Ties . In Tricks , Domenico Starnone presents an unusual duel between two formidable minds. One is Daniele Mallarico, a once-successful illustrator who feels his artistic prowess fading. The other is Mario, Daniele’s four-year-old grandson. Daniele is living in virtual solitude in Milan when his daughter asks him to come to Naples to babysit Mario for a few days. Shut inside his childhood home―an apartment in the center of Naples that is filled with memoires of Daniele’s past―grandfather and grandson match wits as Daniele heads toward a reckoning with his own ambitions and life choices. Meanwhile, Naples pulses outside, a wily, passionate city whose influence can never be shaken. As translator Jhumpa Lahiri says in her introduction, Tricks is “an extremely playful literary composition” by the Strega Prize–winning novelist whom many consider to be one of Italy’s greatest living writers.
Domenico Starnone was born in Naples and lives in Rome. He is the author of thirteen works of fiction, including First Execution (Europa, 2009), Via Gemito , winner of Italy’s most prestigious literary prize, the Strega, and Ties (Europa, 2016), a New York Times Editors pick. Jhumpa Lahiri is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Interpreter of Maladies . Her books include The Namesake , Unaccustomed Earth , The Lowland , and, most recently, In Other Words , an exploration of language and identity.
Reviews
-
Domenico Starnone, a sharp observer of family life, is always penetrating, never sentimental. In this short and tart tale, an aging man finds himself enmeshed in absurd combat with his precocious four year old grandson. His characters are not exactly likeable but they are, in the end, deeply sympathetic. Starnone is a plausible candidate for the pseudonymous Elena Ferrante, and this novel shows why.
-
You can tell a masterful piece of writing by how true it rings, and the sound this novel makes is resoundingly true. Daniele is an aging illustrator, attempting to put together a series of pictures for a deluxe version of Henry James's short story 'The Jolly Corner'; but he is interrupted in his work by a summons from his daughter, Betta. She needs Daniele to look after four-year-old Mario while she and her jealous husband are away at a conference. The story explores the few days that Daniele and his grandson share. This book could have gone so wrong, in many ways - it could have split the narrative between Daniele and Mario, for instance, or it could have had both Daniele and Mario come out unnaturally enriched by the experience of their time together. But this is real literature, and if anything is learned, knowledge comes free of cliche. 'Trick' is translated by Jhumpa Lahiri, who has done an admirable job of keeping the prose tight yet also feather light. For a story that contains so many nods towards Henry James it is remarkably readable (I have yet to read a James novel to its conclusion, but 'Trick' took me two days in an otherwise busy schedule). I must makes special mention of Asymptote, a literary journal that specialises in works in translation; without them I would never have come across this magnificent book, and for that I am inordinately thankful.
-
The narrator is in his seventies and goes from his home in Milan to Naples, his birthplace and where his daughter lives with her husband and child. "Grandpa" then has to care for little Mario, who is both angel and devil. The grandpa questions everything about his minor career success, his marriage before his wife passed, and his supposed escape from the many ghosts of his past. This book has all the power of Lolita, even as the questions faced are completely different in nature -- it will push you to ask similar questions about your own life, past, fidelity, and success or lack thereof.
-
schnell & zuverlässig
-
The first part of the book was interesting and real, but second part confounded me - it was almost a retelling? But lost me totally.