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Ties

Domenico Starnone,

Jhumpa Lahiri (Translator)

Start date: March 1, 2018

Finish date: May 31, 2018

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May 29, 2018 Elizabeth (Alaska) rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: from-friends, twenty-first-century, europe-other

This is one of those books that proves the statement that not all books are for all people. Several of my GR friends rated this book highly. I had high hopes it would be the same for me. I was dismayed at the first two chapters when they were letters from a wife to her husband who had just left her for another (and younger) woman. She wanted him back, and yet the letters were full of such hatred and venom I thought I should just abandon the book then and there. But I needed a short book to fill This is one of those books that proves the statement that not all books are for all people. Several of my GR friends rated this book highly. I had high hopes it would be the same for me. I was dismayed at the first two chapters when they were letters from a wife to her husband who had just left her for another (and younger) woman. She wanted him back, and yet the letters were full of such hatred and venom I thought I should just abandon the book then and there. But I needed a short book to fill out a couple of days until I could start a book for the next challenge, and so I stuck with it. Unfortunately the book did not get better, not even when these horrible hate-filled letters stopped and the narrative was taken over by the philandering husband.

One would think, even so, this would be a book I liked. The prose is good, the characterizations nearly fully-fleshed. Conflict makes a good novel. I have said before that I don't have to like the characters to like the book. But not liking and despising are not quite the same thing. There is not one person in the entire novel that has one redeeming quality. Why would the wife want a man who plainly didn't want her? So she could punish him for the rest of his life telling him what a worthless bastard he is? And why would she decide that make her life better? I won't even get started on the children. My stomach is in knots just writing this.

One further thought that has nothing to do with the quality of the writing or characters. I do not understand why a book originally called Lacci, which means Laces, is called Ties in English. There is a scene having to do with shoe laces. Are we English speakers too stupid to understand Laces that we have to be coddled into having them called Ties? I have never in my life called laces ties. Was this supposed to talk down to us that we couldn't understand the ties of life if the book was called Laces?

I apologize to my GR friends who rated this highly. I hated this book. I rarely give a book 1-star, but this one, to me, is highly deserving. ...more

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