The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan

Starnone’s prose captures the feverishness and weird juxtapositions of a child’s inner life. “Coherence doesn’t belong to the world of children, it’s an illness we contract later on, growing up,” he writes [...] Now he tries to cement his experiences in words: “The problem, if there is one, is that the pleasure of writing is fragile, it has a hard time making it up the slippery slope of real life.” The New Yorker

The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan, by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky (Europa).