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s.penkevich's Reviews > The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan
The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl from Milan
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�We tell ourselves stories in order to live,� Joan Didion once wrote, yet, sometimes, we tell stories in order to keep those already gone alive within us, �we try to keep them alive to keep them with us.� Fashioning himself as a post-war Orpheus, Mimi, the narrator of Domenico Starone’s semi-autobiographical bildungsroman The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl From Milan, harnesses language as his way of plunging headlong into the underworld to resurrect his heart’s desire. Or at least sustain their memory is stanzas of poetry. Wonderfully translated into English by Oonagh Stransky—no small feat considering the crucial importance of language to the story—this is a sharp and insightful coming of age about a youth obsessed with �the eruptions of Vesuvius, the way language is crumbling, how words can’t keep up with voices and sounds, and how everything is decaying and perishing.� In short, someone I would have definitely gotten along with in college.From the days of his youth watching the titular �girl from Milan� with adoration and anxiety—lest she tumble from the balcony railing upon which she dances like a �wind-up ballerina’—to his days studying linguistics at University, Starone looks at the way storytelling, language, and love can shape a life for a rather moving novella that was so engaging I stayed up into the early hours to read most of it in one sitting.
�I realized that the girl and her voice existed inside my head like some charred papyrus that a machine—some eighteenth-century contraption—was delicately unrolling, restoring to me the story of my tumultuous first love.�
Who doesn’t love a good myth to cast oneself within as the bold and brave hero when you are a kid? �Myths are made for the imagination to breath life into them,� wrote Albert Camus and, already at the age of 8, Mimi is penning epic poems of love for the �girl from Milan� and challenging his best friend, Lello, to contests of bravery (including a duel to the death) beneath her balcony to prove his worthiness to her. The girl is, in his vision, an idealized figure of myth as the beautiful young maiden in need of rescue and he frequently fantasizes how, like Orpheus, he would rescue her from the pit of the dead if she were to fall while dancing.
Juxtaposed with the girl is his grandmother, doting and kind, yet upon seeing a photo of her in her youth Mimi is horrified to see the toll time has taken on her appearance. At an early age, we see Mimi contending with the ways the language of myth often simplifies and objectifies the nuances of a person into a singular idea for the purpose of moral lessons. Roland Barthes discusses this in his work, Mythologies, how the language of myth allows it �to describe and condemn at one stroke,� flattening them into a �category into which they are forcibly made to fit� : the beautiful maiden, the old hag, etc.
This is part of the root of the issue where beauty denotes good, lack of beauty denotes evil, etc. We also see how the girl is an object, a prize to be won through his duel and even her dancing is described as �a wind up ballerina� as if she is a mechanical toy operating for the enjoyment of others. Neither character is given a name (at least for most of the novella) either, making them fully under the framing of the narrator without any proper noun of their own. Considering the girl becomes a sort of muse that haunts and inspires him, one might worry the story would dip into the rather toxic muse culture artist misogyny of the past, yet, in The Girl From Milan, much of Mimi’s coming-of-age will revolve around returning the nuance to the simplified objectifications of childhood.
�We spend half our life studying the mortal remains of others and the other half creating mortal remains of our own.�
I found the depictions of childhood to be rather endearing and true, particularly in the ways an early crush can leave you reeling �both overjoyed and in total despair.� Mimi is intrigued by death from an early age, egged on by stories from his Grandmother about the land of the dead which he believes is beneath the boarded up well outside his apartment and learning about his grandfather—who died at a young age falling in a work accident—brandishing a sword from his cane at any man who checked out his wife only �made the pairing of loving and dying even stronger.� It is a tough world in post-war Italy and there is a sense that love and violence go hand-in-hand as the only way of defending honor, which he plays out with his friend when they duel “to the death� over who can speak to “the girl from Milan� which they �decided to resolve the matter with a duel to the death, to be held in the courtyard near the entrance to the underworld.� But its felt as a cultural artifact of the era:
Like the aforementioned Camus quote, his imagination is playing out myth into real life. All the while there is the doting grandmother who engages with his creativity and speaks about her late husband despite the pain it causes her and we being to see how the real Orpheus myth is being played out less in resurrecting the girl from Milan and more in resurrecting the grandfather and, more notably, retrieving his Grandmother’s youth. While his love for the girl dominates his thought, he is peripherally aware of how his Grandmother’s affection for him—her like a �servant around the clock and I her distracted lord’—is a lifegiving act teaching him love in a way he hopes to express to others:
Yet still he is infatuated with the girl and his efforts to become a writer, which is how he gives meaning to himself and his experiences.
�if I scratch away at the surface of even the liveliest letter, I always find a dead one.�
Committed to �the human condition, destruction, memory� and the way storytelling is a way of keeping people close and processing life, he chases language as an academic pursuit. The university, which his grandmother envisions as a sort of paradise in contrast with the land of the dead, becomes his way to seek his own efforts towards disintegration and he obsesses over the ways language has a life and death to it. He has a girlfriend but is �more interested in language generally � in the way most of the flowers of the voice blossom in the air only to wither without ever getting transcribed,� which, as a former linguistics minor, I can really get down with. But it is with his courses that he begins to realize that it isn’t the girl from Milan that is difficult to pin down and resurrect but his grandmother who �I’d put her down on the page and only a few lines later I had to put her away in dejection.� Language is key to the novel and in his Orpheus pursuits to resurrect dead language he discovers that his Grandmother’s speak is the answer and records her speech for a project which, in its own way, brings her back to life.
Starone often speaks about the importance of language in his upbringing . �I have had a complicated relationship with Naples, and above all with its dialect,� he admits, mirroring Mimi’s own feelings of inadequacy with language being often corrected in school while desiring to be a writer.
This importance around language makes the translation of this even more impressive and Oonagh Stransky does an excellent job, keeping some of the original Italian in while leaving the dialect untranslated as well, delivered in long phrases devoid of spaces to imply the difficulty of picking up individual words. �I admire the work of my translators, the texts are difficult especially due to the connection between language and dialect,� Starone said in in 2024 for The House on Via Gemito (also translated by Oonagh), �Oonagh has great sensitivity and competence, and I have much respect for her. I always felt the book was in good hands.�
The book itself is rather rather autobiographical, or at least hinting at it. Mimi, for instance, is a diminutive of Domenico. As Oonagh has �There are clear parallels between the Neapolitan Quartet and many of Starnone’s books: they focus on characters who rise up out of working-class Naples, become empowered through education, and struggle with questions of selfhood.� The Neapolitan Quartet from Elena Ferrante came to mind frequently while reading this and it isn’t hard to see why some accused Starone of actually being Ferrante, which he had denied (his wife, translator Anita Raja, is the ) though I did enjoy the blur of fictionalized memoir in both.
By the end, we see the mythical images of both the girl and the grandmother given a more nuanced and humanized perspective and Mimi learns a great deal in this brief yet powerful coming of age tale.The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl From Milan is an impressive little book with a cavalcade of themes all informing upon each other in such a succinct and nuanced network of ideas and I can’t wait to read more of Starone’s work. A lovely look at myth, the muse, and the importance of language and storytelling.
4/5
�The little life we truly live always remains in the margins, that marks and signs are constitutionally inadequate, fluctuating merely between what you try to say and pure dismay, and thank goodness it is thus.�
�I realized that the girl and her voice existed inside my head like some charred papyrus that a machine—some eighteenth-century contraption—was delicately unrolling, restoring to me the story of my tumultuous first love.�
Who doesn’t love a good myth to cast oneself within as the bold and brave hero when you are a kid? �Myths are made for the imagination to breath life into them,� wrote Albert Camus and, already at the age of 8, Mimi is penning epic poems of love for the �girl from Milan� and challenging his best friend, Lello, to contests of bravery (including a duel to the death) beneath her balcony to prove his worthiness to her. The girl is, in his vision, an idealized figure of myth as the beautiful young maiden in need of rescue and he frequently fantasizes how, like Orpheus, he would rescue her from the pit of the dead if she were to fall while dancing.
�While the thought of her death was intolerable, the prospect of travelling to the underworld to bring her back was very appealing…at least spending the rest of my life lamenting—in both poetry and prose—her luminous body and the scent of spring. The idea of committing my life to this labor of love and how it would elevate me to the status of unrivaled poet moved me deeply.�
Juxtaposed with the girl is his grandmother, doting and kind, yet upon seeing a photo of her in her youth Mimi is horrified to see the toll time has taken on her appearance. At an early age, we see Mimi contending with the ways the language of myth often simplifies and objectifies the nuances of a person into a singular idea for the purpose of moral lessons. Roland Barthes discusses this in his work, Mythologies, how the language of myth allows it �to describe and condemn at one stroke,� flattening them into a �category into which they are forcibly made to fit� : the beautiful maiden, the old hag, etc.
�These categories are none other than those of classical comedy or treatises of graphology: boastful, irascible, selfish, cunning, lecherous, harsh, man exists in their eyes only through the 'character traits' which label him for society as the object of a more or less easy absorption, the subject of a more or less respectful submission. Utilitarian, taking no account of any state of consciousness, this psychology has nevertheless the pretension of giving as a basis for actions a preexisting inner person, it postulates 'the soul': it judges man as a 'conscience' without being embarrassed by having previously described him as an object.�
This is part of the root of the issue where beauty denotes good, lack of beauty denotes evil, etc. We also see how the girl is an object, a prize to be won through his duel and even her dancing is described as �a wind up ballerina� as if she is a mechanical toy operating for the enjoyment of others. Neither character is given a name (at least for most of the novella) either, making them fully under the framing of the narrator without any proper noun of their own. Considering the girl becomes a sort of muse that haunts and inspires him, one might worry the story would dip into the rather toxic muse culture artist misogyny of the past, yet, in The Girl From Milan, much of Mimi’s coming-of-age will revolve around returning the nuance to the simplified objectifications of childhood.
�We spend half our life studying the mortal remains of others and the other half creating mortal remains of our own.�
I found the depictions of childhood to be rather endearing and true, particularly in the ways an early crush can leave you reeling �both overjoyed and in total despair.� Mimi is intrigued by death from an early age, egged on by stories from his Grandmother about the land of the dead which he believes is beneath the boarded up well outside his apartment and learning about his grandfather—who died at a young age falling in a work accident—brandishing a sword from his cane at any man who checked out his wife only �made the pairing of loving and dying even stronger.� It is a tough world in post-war Italy and there is a sense that love and violence go hand-in-hand as the only way of defending honor, which he plays out with his friend when they duel “to the death� over who can speak to “the girl from Milan� which they �decided to resolve the matter with a duel to the death, to be held in the courtyard near the entrance to the underworld.� But its felt as a cultural artifact of the era:
�The whole world, every single existence, orbited around this cruel battle. In one way or another, we men were forced to live in a constant state of alert, we had to be ready to fight or fight back, to be wronged so that we could get revenge, or to instigate wrongs ourselves and thereby crush all potential avengers. Yes, that was our destiny, and nothing could silence us, not even death. On the contrary.�
Like the aforementioned Camus quote, his imagination is playing out myth into real life. All the while there is the doting grandmother who engages with his creativity and speaks about her late husband despite the pain it causes her and we being to see how the real Orpheus myth is being played out less in resurrecting the girl from Milan and more in resurrecting the grandfather and, more notably, retrieving his Grandmother’s youth. While his love for the girl dominates his thought, he is peripherally aware of how his Grandmother’s affection for him—her like a �servant around the clock and I her distracted lord’—is a lifegiving act teaching him love in a way he hopes to express to others:
�It’s an enormous consolation to know that there’s at least one person out there who thinks, even if they’re mistaken: oh, how precious this person is to me, I’ll do everything I can for them until I die. In my own life, I did it whenever I could, but the very first time was for the girl from Milan.�
Yet still he is infatuated with the girl and his efforts to become a writer, which is how he gives meaning to himself and his experiences.
�if I scratch away at the surface of even the liveliest letter, I always find a dead one.�
Committed to �the human condition, destruction, memory� and the way storytelling is a way of keeping people close and processing life, he chases language as an academic pursuit. The university, which his grandmother envisions as a sort of paradise in contrast with the land of the dead, becomes his way to seek his own efforts towards disintegration and he obsesses over the ways language has a life and death to it. He has a girlfriend but is �more interested in language generally � in the way most of the flowers of the voice blossom in the air only to wither without ever getting transcribed,� which, as a former linguistics minor, I can really get down with. But it is with his courses that he begins to realize that it isn’t the girl from Milan that is difficult to pin down and resurrect but his grandmother who �I’d put her down on the page and only a few lines later I had to put her away in dejection.� Language is key to the novel and in his Orpheus pursuits to resurrect dead language he discovers that his Grandmother’s speak is the answer and records her speech for a project which, in its own way, brings her back to life.
�Her tone grew richer, the volume of her voice increased, her ardor grew such that in her eyes I saw other eyes, her gestures were those of other people, her mouth was composed of other mouths, in her words were endless words belonging to other people, her voice so dysregulated that no tool could ever record it, much less the act of writing.�
Starone often speaks about the importance of language in his upbringing . �I have had a complicated relationship with Naples, and above all with its dialect,� he admits, mirroring Mimi’s own feelings of inadequacy with language being often corrected in school while desiring to be a writer.
� The school demonized it in the 1950s; as a result, I considered it an obstacle to attain and master a good Italian. Nevertheless, it was my language, the language of the city that defined me and which I know best. Now, in my old age, I have finally chosen to give voice to that original clash between the Neapolitan and Italian languages, telling the story of how I dealt with it and how my characters deal with it.�
This importance around language makes the translation of this even more impressive and Oonagh Stransky does an excellent job, keeping some of the original Italian in while leaving the dialect untranslated as well, delivered in long phrases devoid of spaces to imply the difficulty of picking up individual words. �I admire the work of my translators, the texts are difficult especially due to the connection between language and dialect,� Starone said in in 2024 for The House on Via Gemito (also translated by Oonagh), �Oonagh has great sensitivity and competence, and I have much respect for her. I always felt the book was in good hands.�
The book itself is rather rather autobiographical, or at least hinting at it. Mimi, for instance, is a diminutive of Domenico. As Oonagh has �There are clear parallels between the Neapolitan Quartet and many of Starnone’s books: they focus on characters who rise up out of working-class Naples, become empowered through education, and struggle with questions of selfhood.� The Neapolitan Quartet from Elena Ferrante came to mind frequently while reading this and it isn’t hard to see why some accused Starone of actually being Ferrante, which he had denied (his wife, translator Anita Raja, is the ) though I did enjoy the blur of fictionalized memoir in both.
By the end, we see the mythical images of both the girl and the grandmother given a more nuanced and humanized perspective and Mimi learns a great deal in this brief yet powerful coming of age tale.The Mortal and Immortal Life of the Girl From Milan is an impressive little book with a cavalcade of themes all informing upon each other in such a succinct and nuanced network of ideas and I can’t wait to read more of Starone’s work. A lovely look at myth, the muse, and the importance of language and storytelling.
4/5
�The little life we truly live always remains in the margins, that marks and signs are constitutionally inadequate, fluctuating merely between what you try to say and pure dismay, and thank goodness it is thus.�
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Reading Progress
January 27, 2025
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Started Reading
January 27, 2025
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January 29, 2025
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coming-of-age
January 29, 2025
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language
January 29, 2025
– Shelved as:
mythology
January 29, 2025
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writing
January 29, 2025
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Amina
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Jan 30, 2025 02:41AM
Your reviews are always a labor of love, S., once again very much enjoyed reading the importance of how language defines us. 🤍
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Absolutely gorgeous review, s.! I need to pop this as high up my TBR list as possible. Linguistics, Camus, and Milan - sounds totally up my biblio-alley haha : ) .
Amina wrote: "Your reviews are always a labor of love, S., once again very much enjoyed reading the importance of how language defines us. 🤍"Thank you so much! I went into this expecting just a quick palate cleanser of a story but ended up REALLY enjoying it (and picked up another of his books because of it). I do love anything that gets into language haha
emily wrote: "Absolutely gorgeous review, s.! I need to pop this as high up my TBR list as possible. Linguistics, Camus, and Milan - sounds totally up my biblio-alley haha : ) ."I think you would like this one! It was SO good, I could not stop reading it and now I'm going to read his big book that was up for the Booker because I kind of love his style (which...reads a lot like Elena Ferrante hahaha but I do truly believe he is NOT Ferrante theres no way in the world a man wrote those books). But its so good, I got way too geeked about all the linguistic notation that gets used and forgot that the way I write letters (like my "a" and "e") is specifically because of taking linguistics classes and needing to differentiate haha
I’m sold, haha. Adding this one to my TBR immediately. Thanks for such a marvelous review, Penkevich. :)
Fantastic review, as always!
Amazing review, Steve. It sounds like something that we can learn from if we pay attention to the subtle messages. Thank you. ☺️
Axl Oswaldo wrote: "I’m sold, haha. Adding this one to my TBR immediately. Thanks for such a marvelous review, Penkevich. :)"Oh yay I hope you enjoy. I was surprised how much I REALLY liked this one, it hit a lot of my favorite notes haha. I'll be eager to hear what you think
Heather wrote: "Fantastic review, as always!"Thank you so much! This was quite the lovely read, I can't wait to try more of his books!
Karen wrote: "Amazing review, Steve. It sounds like something that we can learn from if we pay attention to the subtle messages. Thank you. ☺️"Thank you so much! OOo yes that is a really good way to look at it. I love the whole aspect about keeping alive the grandmother's diction and how, if he doesn't, it might vanish forever which is kind of wild to think about (I took a class where we had to think about that once so I was SUPER Into that part haha).
I don't know that I would have thought about reading this book until bumping into your eloquent review, S! My gosh, the writing samples are to die for! It's interesting you mention Ferrante in your review because I was thinking about her as I was reading your thoughts on this! I really must add this to the list :)
Candi wrote: "I don't know that I would have thought about reading this book until bumping into your eloquent review, S! My gosh, the writing samples are to die for! It's interesting you mention Ferrante in your..."Isn’t the writing incredible!? I picked up his big one from last year to read next this blew me away so much—and rather unexpectedly so. But yea I kind of see why people thought he might be Ferrante, it was hard to not compare them in my mind while reading this. I don’t think he is, to be clear, but damn is he good. Also all the linguistics stuff brought me right back to my university linguistic classes and I immediately ordered a copy of the new translation of Roland Barthes haha
Also thank you so much! Would love to hear your thoughts on this one
"Also all the linguistics stuff brought me right back to my university linguistic classes and I immediately ordered a copy of the new translation of Roland Barthes haha"I love how one book leads us right to another, S! And oftentimes it means a purchase of another! :D :D
Candi wrote: ""Also all the linguistics stuff brought me right back to my university linguistic classes and I immediately ordered a copy of the new translation of Roland Barthes haha"I love how one book leads ..."
I do love that, though to be honest I’m just always looking for any excuse to buy another book haha
