Farewell, Ghosts

June 15, 2020
A woman becomes mired in the moment that her father disappeared from her life. In her first book published in English, Italian novelist Terranova tells an affecting tale of a woman consumed by the loss of her father, who left the house one day when she was 13 and was never heard from again. Set in Sicily, where the now 36-year-old Ida goes to help her mother clear out the family's apartment in preparation for selling, the novel evokes the world so palpably portrayed by Elena Ferrante, a comparison underscored by Ida's troubled relationship with Sara, a young woman who had been her closest friend but now spurns her efforts to reconnect. The tension between Ida and Sara is likely to remind readers of Ferrante's Elena and Lila, of My Brilliant Friend. Terranova's restrained, graceful prose, translated by former New Yorker editor Goldstein, deftly captures Ida's sorrow and anger. Her father had been depressed for years, and while Ida's mother went off to work, Ida was left to feed him lunch and watch him as he lay in bed, day after day. When he disappeared, she was consumed with guilt. "Those who disappear redraw time," she thinks, "and a circle of obsessions envelops the survivors." She and her mother never talked about what happened. Their world, she says, "had gotten stuck," and each carried out "a stubborn pretense that nothing was wrong," never confiding their despair, even to one another, never asking anyone for help. Their family of two, she reflects, was "maimed and full of silences." During her brief return to Sicily, surrounded by artifacts of her past, Ida is forced both to confront painful memories and to face the effects of her self-absorption and deeply held identity as "the daughter of the absence" of her father. A delicate rendering of a life smothered by overwhelming loss.

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June 22, 2020
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 cliché and sentimentality, this sharp examination of a life interrupted is one to savor.