Farewell, Ghosts

“The passage of time remained for me a great hardship,” Ida, the narrator of Farewell, Ghosts tells us towards the end of the novel; in many sense, this simple sentence is the thesis of the book. Ida remains stuck in the past, forever replaying the morning her father disappeared when she was 13 years old. Ida, now in her thirties, has returned to her mother’s home in Messina, the capital of Sicily, Italy. Her mother has decided to clean out their home and fix the crumbling roof in preparation to sell it. For Ida, who has a new life in Rome with her husband, returning home is difficult.

“A mundane visit becomes a reckoning,” the jacket copy tells us, and boy, is that true. Nadia Terranova has crafted an expert novel of what happens when you are confronted with your past, and how one lets go of ghosts. Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (translator of Elena Ferrante as well, so she may be familiar to you), the story is readable and absorbing. By physically returning to the site of her trauma — watching the mental decline of her father in their home and his eventual disappearance – Ida has to deal with what really happened when she was a teenager, and search for closure.

I loved this read on the novel from readingintranslation.com: “In Farewell, Ghosts the house works as a figure for the psyche, drawing on the architectonics of memory and the power of place to define identity... The grounding of Ida’s sense of self extends to the topography of her hometown Messina and its geographic specificity as well. Ida walks through the city, revisiting the places where her father used to take her, charting a map of her past in the present.”

Rating: ★★★★★