Publishers Weekly
06/22/2020
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. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
Nadia Terranova’s narrative style captivates us with its precision and sensitivity.”
—Annie Ernaux
"I also loved Farewell, Ghosts, a much more sun-drenched novel by Nadia Terranova, in which a woman returns to the Sicily of her youth to confront her family secrets. Beautifully translated by Ann Goldstein, Elena Ferrante’s translator, it’s perfect for the reader who wants to explore modern Italian fiction beyond Ferrante." —Jonathan Coe in The New Statesman
"Nadia Terranova’s sophomore novel—her first to be published in English—is a carefully crafted meditation on familial ties and the pernicious effects of unprocessed trauma on a woman’s sentimental education. . . . a tale of homecoming both so familiar and devastatingly new that it is sure to gain Terranova a robust following among English-speaking audiences."
—Asymptote Journal
“Readers who appreciate Ferrante’s unpicking of the legacies of trauma will find a sister narrative in Terranova’s book, in which protagonist Ida leaves Rome to help her mother clean out the family home in Messina, Sicily. This means returning to the place where her father, deeply depressed, disappeared, and where Ida and her mother lived on day after day, unable to find the words to express the pain of his absence... Farewell, Ghosts explores what it is like to be robbed of life: by grief, by depression, by self-destruction... In this novel full of ghosts, every street name is a haunting and every word is a summoning to the dead. 'His coffin remained everywhere,' Ida says at one point, but it’s she who is unable to live.” —Hannah Williams, The Guardian
"Born and raised in coastal Sicily, Ida has since shaken her salty roots for adult life in Rome. She’s married, has a career, and is comfortable in her decision to age childless; but still finds herself unsatisfied. When Ida’s mother calls her back to Sicily to help sell Ida’s childhood home, Ida must reckon with the trauma that has informed all of her decisions thus far: the disappearance of her father when she was 13. The mystery behind her father’s exit became the reason for every spat between Ida and her mother growing up, and the reason Ida never fully gave herself to the friendships and relationships she’s moved through since adolescence. On this trip home, Ida must face her original heartbreak, and the people who became collateral damage, with the hopes of saving her marriage and family in the future. To say this is beautifully translated doesn’t even scratch the surface; Goldstein, who has also translated Elena Ferrante's novels, finds poetry in Terranova’s every line. Together, these two artists have birthed an aching, translingual masterpiece."
—Booklist
"Nadia Terranova’s novel Farewell, Ghosts, in Ann Goldstein’s translation, summons the power of the house in order to dissect the relationship between self and space, memory and reality.....Comparing Terranova to Elena Ferrante, another contemporary Italian woman writer who thematizes disappearance and delves into the recesses of the feminine psyche, seems inevitable."
—Stiliana Milkova, Reading in Translation
“[Farewell, Ghosts] is the best book I read in the last year. It moved me deeply.”
—Domenico Starnone
“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. ... A delicate rendering of a life smothered by overwhelming loss.”
—Kirkus Reviews
"Lucidly translated by Ann Goldstein (of Elena Ferrante fame), this is an exact and intimate tale about identity and absence. Farewell, Ghosts tells the story of thirty-something Ida, plunged back into a painful pastwhen her mother decides to renovate and sell the crumbling family home on the Sicilian coast. As Ida sifts through old mementos, memories of her father’s disappearance and fraught moments with her mother resurface. Will she find the closure she needs?" —Monocle
Kirkus Reviews
2020-06-03
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.
