Farewell, Ghosts
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This award-winning novel about a woman facing her past introduces Terranova to English-speaking audiences. Translated by Ann Goldstein, translator of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet.
Finalist, Premio Strega, 2019 | Winner, Premio Alassio Centolibri | Selected among the 10 Best Italian Books of 2018 by Corriere della Sera
Ida is a married woman in her late thirties, who lives in Rome and works at a radio station. Her mother wants to renovate the family apartment in Messina, to put it up for sale and asks her daughter to sort through her things--to decide what to keep and what to throw away.
Surrounded by the objects of her past, Ida is forced to deal with the trauma she experienced as a girl, twenty-three years earlier, when her father left one morning, never to return. The fierce silences between mother and daughter, the unbalanced friendships that leave her emotionally drained, the sense of an identity based on anomaly, even the relationship with her husband, everything revolves around the figure of her absent father. Mirroring herself in that absence, Ida has grown up into a woman dominated by fear, suspicious of any form of desire. However, as her childhood home besieges her with its ghosts, Ida will have to find a way to break the spiral and let go of her father finally.
Beautifully translated by Ann Goldstein, who also translated Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet, Farewell, Ghosts is a poetic and intimate novel about what it means to build one's own identity.
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Italian writer Terranova's heartfelt English-language debut looks at a childhood trauma's derailing effects on a young woman. Ida Laquidara, a 30-something writer in Rome, is called home to Messina, Sicily, by her mother to sort through the leftover ephemera of her childhood before the house is renovated and eventually sold. She dutifully agrees, figuring it will be easy since she cares about nothing except a box that contains objects left by her father, which trigger painful memories. Upon Ida's arrival, she is haunted by recurring nightmares and visions of her father, who abandoned the family when she was 13. While navigating a fraught relationship with her mother and the ways in which too little seems to have changed at the house, Ida reflects on her father's mental illness and attempts to connect with an old friend. When a surprise tragedy casts Ida's own ruminations in a new light, closure for the loss of her father feels more within reach as she devises a plan for what to do with the artifacts in the box. Terranova writes striking flashbacks that conjure the power of old wounds to produce new sadness. Free of clich and sentimentality, this sharp examination of a life interrupted is one to savor.
