Ties by Domenico Starnone
Published 2014 · 42,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Domestic Fiction
How hard is Ties to read?
Ties scores 65 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
- Lahiri's translation keeps Starnone's plain, exact Italian in clear English, with domestic and academic vocabulary and no specialised register beyond a few Neapolitan turns.
- Sentence structure: 46 out of 100
- Short sentences in the letters, longer meandering paragraphs in Aldo's section as an old man's mind wanders, with no formal difficulty in either.
- Abstraction: 54 out of 100
- A domestic story that keeps generalising about what a family is for, whether people can be repaired, and what obligation survives desire, mostly in Aldo's self-justifying reflections.
- Information density: 44 out of 100
- Small cast, few events, no historical background beyond Naples and Rome in the 1970s. The density is emotional rather than informational.
- Narrative indirection: 82 out of 100
- Three narrators who contradict each other, and a middle section in which the reader is invited to trust a man whose account is demolished by his children fifty pages later. What actually happened is assembled from three incompatible reports.
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- The shoelaces of the title — Aldo teaching his son a knot that comes undone — the ransacked flat, the box of photographs and the cat named Labes, Latin for ruin, do the book's whole argument.
- Ironic distance: 76 out of 100
- The comfortable reconciliation of part two is exposed as a forty-year hostage arrangement in part three. Every tender detail of Aldo's old age is re-read as evidence against him.
- Resolution withholding: 70 out of 100
- The cat's fate, the parents' reaction and the children's future are all left hanging, and the final revelation about the photograph reframes the marriage without concluding it.
- Structural complexity: 72 out of 100
- Three parts in three voices and three periods — epistolary, then first-person retrospective, then the children — each reversing the previous one's meaning, with a physical box of documents functioning as the hinge.
How Ties is regarded
Ties holds a literary regard score of 58 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.