Reviews with content warning for Grief - A Girl Returned

A perfect little novella encapsulating so much within. Originally published in Italian as L'Arminuta, this is Donatella Di Pietrantonio's third novel which won the 2017 Premio Campiello and has been adapted into a film of the same title by Giuseppe Bonito. The English translation in 2019 is superbly done by Ann Goldstein, from Europa Editions.

So L'Arminuta in the Abbruzzese dialect of Italy (from the Abruzzo region) means 'the returned' ("la ritornata") and is the moniker/nickname that our unnamed adolescent narrator is saddled with. Without rhyme or reason, she has been uprooted from her seaside home and family she grew up in and 'returned' to her birth family. We feel her bewilderment, hurt, disorientation, rage as she tries to bargain and wheedle with her 'father' into bringing her back, constructing elaborate scenarios for the reasons her sick 'mother' had to let her go.

In time I lost that confused idea of normality, too, and today I don't really what place a mother is. It's absent from my life the way good health, shelter, certainty can be absent. It's an enduring emptiness, which I know and can't get past. My head whirls if I look inside it. A desolate landscape that keeps you from sleeping at night and constructs nightmares in the little sleep it allows. The only mother I never lost is the one of my fears.

Donatella Di Pietrantonio's writing is often compared to Elena Ferrante's (and they have the same English translator for their books). I can see why, given they're both Italian novelists who write about Italian adolescents grappling with the inexplicable adult world but that's where to me the similarities end. In Ferrante's world, there's florid technicolor strokes with telenovela melodrama whereas with Di Pietrantonio, it's carefully controlled, coiled evocative minimalist framing. She manages to paint a scene, evoke the mood, plumb the inner world of her characters with a few choice words leaving our imagination and reasoning to fill out the rest. I was transfixed by this world she created, following the journey of our obstinate narrator and her growing relationship with her sister Adriana in her impoverished large family.

Motherhood in all its meanings is also thoughtfully examined: I softly repeated the word mamma a hundred times, until it lost all meaning and was only an exercise of the lips. I was an orphan with two living mothers. One had given me up with her milk still on my tongue, the other had given me back at the age of thirteen. I was a child of separations, false or unspoken kinships, distances.

I really like this reflective review https://readingintranslation.com/2019/08/19/the-mother-of-all-questions-donatella-di-pietrantonios-a-girl-returned-translated-from-italian-by-ann-goldstein/ on the Reading In Translation website by Barbara Halla.

The sequel to this - A Sister's Story - is upcoming in April 2022 also translated by Ann Goldstein, it'll be about Adriana and I can't wait! Thanks too to Storygraph friend LibbysBookShelf for reviewing this book and rousing my interest.

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