Trust
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF FALL 2021
Following the international success of Ties and the National Book Award-shortlisted Trick, Domenico Starnone gives readers another searing portrait of human relationships and human folly.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Starnone (Trick) returns with an elegant story of a man's lifelong struggle to perfect his public persona while hiding a secret. Pietro Vella, a self-important 30-something high school teacher, has a tempestuous affair with Teresa Quadraro, a former student who is eight years his junior. She suggests that in order to preserve their love, they each tell the other their worst secret. His involves an "embarrassing affair," while hers remains unspecified. But their increasingly abusive relationship—he talks down to her, she threatens him with a knife, he drags her by the hair in a fit of jealousy over another man—doesn't last long. Pietro later marries Nadia, a former colleague, yet continues to obsess over Teresa. When Pietro is 80, his daughter, Emma, lobbies to ensure he is awarded a prestigious teaching award. Much to Pietro's horror, Teresa, now a renowned scientist, is invited to speak at the ceremony. Lahiri's intelligent translation captures Starnone's subtle account of the characters' shifting power dynamics, and the novel ends with Teresa's take on their affair, in which she admits she still loves him and ambiguously claims to be "far more dangerous than he." Teresa's voice is a tonic after Pietro's misogynistic narration, but it's too brief. This will leave readers wanting more.
