Trust by Domenico Starnone is the second of a handful of short books that I picked up at the local library (the first was Comfort Me with Apples).
Publisher’s Blurb
Pietro and Teresa’s love affair is tempestuous and passionate. After yet another terrible argument, she gets an idea: they should tell each other something they’ve never told another person, something they’re too ashamed to tell anyone. They will hear the other’s confessions without judgment and with love in their hearts. In this way, Teresa thinks, they will remain united forever, more intimately connected than ever.
A few days after sharing their shameful secrets, they break up. Not long after, Pietro meets Nadia, falls in love, and proposes. But the shadow of the secret he confessed to Teresa haunts him, and Teresa herself periodically reappears, standing at the crossroads, it seems, of every major moment in his life. Or is it he who seeks her out?
Starnone is a master storyteller and a novelist of the highest order. His gaze is trained unwaveringly on the fault lines in our public personas and the complexities of our private selves. Trust asks how much we are willing to bend to show the world our best side, knowing full well that when we are at our most vulnerable we are also at our most dangerous.
My take
Like the Valente novella, Trust is a short work of fiction that I enjoyed but wasn’t exactly sure what to make of it.
The kernel at the heart of the story is the secret shared between Pietro and Teresa. Never revealed, but a thread woven through the entire story. Sometimes the tensions builds and it feels like everything will come crashing down but it never quite does.
I enjoyed the story as a mediation on the way we create stories and perceptions of ourselves and our lives, about who we are and why we do what we do, etc. At the heart of the story is the idea that shared risk can bind people together but also push them apart. There is a sort of magnet effect of both attraction and repulsion and love is the wrestling with this effect.
But I also felt like there was a layer or level or the story or writing that I was missing. Particularly after reading the afterward by Jhumpa Lahiri which is really a musing on language and translation.