... a short, sharp novel that cuts like a scalpel to the core of its characters ... Starnone has earned a reader’s trust with another agile analysis of frail humanity. And Lahiri, whose award-winning fiction has made her one of the most visible figures in contemporary American literature, continues her self-effacing yet wildly ambitious project of vanishing into another language and another writer’s prose.

It's an intriguing novel, with the flawed main character of Pietro going an interesting path. Tellingly, he recedes in the final two parts of the novel, barely a presence in Emma's account and completely out of view in Teresa's -- a kind of fade-out for the character. If the leap Starnone makes in the novel, from one part to the final two, -- forty years or so -- is an enormous one, the essentials are still covered: in a sense, everything after Pietro's own account is only a sort of coda ... Emma makes for something of an abrupt change -- she's not much of a character yet in Pietro's account (unlike Teresa), and so to encounter her in full adulthood, with quite the life already behind her (including already having four children of her own) is a fairly abrupt re-situating of the novel. Still, her and then Teresa's account, both focused around this ceremony of recognition for Pietro, do bring the story to a clear close, a final say on Pietro, and also how he affected many of the people in his life ... Starnone writes engagingly, and while his narrators can be difficult people, each willful in their own different way, they and the situations are intriguing enough that they aren't simply too annoying. If not entirely convincing as a character portrait of this specific kind of man, Trust is still a solid and quite appealing read.

Trust, Starnone’s latest book, beautifully translated again by Lahiri, sets out to keep this singularity at its heart while enriching the narrative with a larger cast of characters and a deeper investigation of preoccupations familiar from his previous works: the rewards and sacrifices of a monogamous life, the risks of self-fashioning, what it means to teach and be taught, the precipitousness of looking back on one’s life ... [Starnone] too portrays unflinchingly the violence, physical and verbal, that can erupt within the closest relationships. His plots also twist, turn and drop (Lahiri astutely compares his writing to a rollercoaster). And he too can close his chapters with the kind of high-drama flourish comparable — in the best way — to a soap opera ... This precise, cinematic control of time and perspective gives an impressive sense of grandness to such brief novels, and brings with it the aching poignancy of hindsight.

Indirection like that, stirring up terrific curiosity, proves one of the novel’s best gambits. Certainly, the text makes room for explicit ugly business. A few scenes throw the rigidity of Italian life into harsh relief, and Nadia has a fine instinct for the jugular ... at his best, Starnone calls attention to that growl even in quiet moments. At the novel’s close, when Pietro’s grown old and appears to have found peace, others take over the storytelling — an astonishing late feint in so brief a book, and one that again makes the skin crawl ... works like a half-remembered nightmare, its shadows more frightening than its monsters ... the best of his recent creative surge.

The irreconcilable pieces of the whole and the wish to commit to a single self plague the characters until their own monstrous natures threaten to drive them mad. Curiously, the women in Starnone’s books appear much less conflicted...His women are wrathful shades, speaking on the literal margins of the books, like the chorus pronouncing judgment. Starnone gives them the last word, but it’s a wail into the abyss. With a few deft strokes of his concentrated prose, he tears down the curtains, blinding his audience with daylight ... incisive.

A sweeping examination of aging, love, and success, Trust allows readers to define the boundaries of the novel’s marriage and families for themselves. This is the third of Starnone’s novels that Lahiri has translated over the last six years, and her deft hand seamlessly reveals Starnone’s masterful narrative at every turn.

This is the fourth of Starnone’s novels to appear in English, and, like the previous three, there is a tight, compact quality to it—there is nothing here that doesn’t need to be here, not a single extraneous sentence. Starnone excels not only with plot and form, but in his depictions of the subtleties of living and loving ... beautifully translated by Lahiri ... in the last quarter of the book, Starnone tightens his reins even further ... Richly nuanced while also understated, Starnone’s latest appearance in English is a novel to be savored.

... an elegant story of a man’s lifelong struggle to perfect his public persona while hiding a secret ... Lahiri’s intelligent translation captures Starnone’s subtle account of the characters’ shifting power dynamics ... Teresa’s voice is a tonic after Pietro’s misogynistic narration, but it’s too brief. This will leave readers wanting more.