Within the first few pages of Farewell, Ghosts, our narrator dreams that she is drowning. There’s no struggle in the act, only a wordless glide between living and dying: “A moment before, I was walking; a moment after, I was drowning.” The sequence serves less as a portent than as a credo; everybody in the novel is suspended in this change of state, neither living nor dead, unable to move on.
A sensation in Nadia Terranova’s native Italy, Farewell, Ghosts’s English version is by Elena Ferrante’s translator Ann Goldstein. 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. “If there was an art in which my mother and I had become experts during my adolescence, that art was silence”, Ida says upon her return, as the two fall back into their old habits. Even when they fight, the absence of the father’s body – of even a confirmed death to mourn – hangs between them, like the image of him in his final days, little more than a body lying in bed, “eyes empty, two blankets too many on his thin body”.
Messina is as defining a location in Terranova’s story as Naples is in Ferrante’s, the city always looking in vain back towards the mainland, almost close enough to touch. It seems to exist in a netherworld reflecting the stasis of its inhabitants: “It must have been after the earthquake of 1908 that we stopped throwing things out, historical memory making us incapable of eliminating the old in favour of the new.” Ida traces its backstreets, visits the rosticcerias, the squares, the marble fountains against which she ate crochette in her youth. She and Messina are symbiotic, unable to shake off the past, denying release. Her family home, too, is twinned with her in decay; full of rubbish, the paint peeling, the rainwater gushing in.
Farewell, Ghosts explores what it is like to be robbed of life: by grief, by depression, by self-destruction. A protagonist so persistent in her suffering can make for tough reading, and the other characters are thin, merely ways for Ida to explore her own feelings. But it’s perhaps fitting that they emerge this way once filtered through Ida’s obsessive retreading of the past. 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.
• Farewell, Ghosts by Nadia Terranova, translated by Ann Goldstein, is published by Seven Stories (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
