After thoroughly enjoying Field Notes from an Extinction by Eoghan Walls I wanted to read another novel from Seven Stories Press. Now, once again, it is my pleasure to discuss another Seven Stories publication: Farewell, Ghosts, by the Italian author, Nadia Terranova. Translated into English in 2020 by Ann Goldstein, the translator of the Elena Ferrante novels, it has been compared to those novels because an adolescent friendship between two girls figures prominently. But the similarity ends there. This first person narrator's purpose in telling this story is less about exploring a friendship than it is about reckoning with the aftereffects of a parent's disappearance.
When Ida was thirteen her father walked out of their apartment and never returned. Suffering from a debilitating depression, he had quit his teaching job and spent the summer days in bed. Ida was his caretaker while her mother was at work, tasked with the burden of making sure he ate the food she prepared. It is understandable, though of course irrational, that she would always feel that in some way she was responsible for his departure.
A disappearance, as opposed to a death, has irresolution at its core. This lack of finality, over the years, becomes a burden. Had he gone off to kill himself or was he living a parallel life somewhere else and intending, at some point, to return? These questions torment Ida even when she is married and living in another city. When her mother asks her to return to Sicily to go through her belongings before the apartment is sold, it is a chance for Ida to confront, at last, her father's action. The first person narration describes this private endeavor without sensationalism or its opposite, analysis. Instead, it is intimate and probing. Ida tells the reader about her marriage, her relationship to her mother, and that important friendship from her girlhood. As she sifts through her life to find some way to put to rest the primal incident of her adolescence, the prospect of discovery kept me fully involved.
The novel takes place in Ida's childhood home, the apartment in Sicily where her mother still lives. Sleeping in her narrow girlhood bed, away from her husband and her life in Rome, she is thrust back to the defining incident of her childhood.
"My father's name tyrannized us: when we gave it respect, it mocked us, departing for weeks, and leaving us enclosed in despair and fear, but if we applied ourselves to forgetting, it came out of the refrigerator, out of the drawer where his medicines had expired, planted itself in front of the table set for a meal; the man who had been my father looked at our life and would continue to do so forever” (41).
What must Ida do to escape this shadow? At one point, she sets out to find Sara, the friend she had confided in when she was younger. Sara still lives in the same city and when Ida arrives at her house one morning, unannounced, Sara is setting out for work. She gives Ida a lift in her car, and when Ida tells her how much she has missed her, Sara lashes out in anger.
"You know why we stopped seeing each other, Ida” (176)?
It is a long and breathtaking exchange. In the small space of the car, as Sara speeds to get to work on time, the tension is at a boiling point. It is the first time I see Ida from another character's perspective, and like a tidal wave, it crashes through everything I have trusted and respected about the narrator. Is she truly as self-centered and self-indulgent as Sara believes? The exchange, which takes place toward the end of the novel, raises so many questions it gives the final forty pages a great burst of energy.
Before this car ride, Ida's world consisted only of her mother, her absent husband, her absent father, and a young workman at the apartment with whom she has a friendship. The Ida connected to these people is a woman steeped in an old and tattered grief. Sara's accusations knock her out of that comfortable place, calling everything into question. What will she do with this new self-knowledge?
Terranova, Nadia. Farewell, Ghosts. Trans. Ann Goldstein. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2020.
Filed under: Creating the momentum for change: viewing a familiar character from a new perspective