Donatella di Pietrantonio’s 2019 novel A Girl Returned (L’Arminuta) was translated into English by Ann Goldstein, the translator for Elena Ferrante’s novels, which seemed like reason enough to read it. That, and it was only about 170 pages, so if it was terrible at least my investment was small. It’s pretty great, though, reminiscent of the better parts of Ferrante’s work in themes and setting.
The title refers to the narrator, who learns at the start of the novel that she’s going to go back to her biological parents, people she doesn’t know at all because she’s been raised since birth by a distant cousin. That cousin was married but childless, so the couple adopted the narrator from her relatively poor parents, who also had a whole mess of children they couldn’t necessarily afford to feed. She gets very little explanation of why she’s going back, but her adoptive mother has taken to her bed and shown signs of illness, so the narrator thinks her mother might have sent her away while recovering, or might even be dying. It’s a shock to her system on multiple levels, as she moves from an affluent life with the people she thought were her real parents to a much less privileged life with people she doesn’t know and who are less educated and cultured than the cousins who reared her. As the novel progresses, we follow her attempts to navigate her new life, including having siblings for the first time, while she also gradually learns more of the truth about both of her families.
There’s a sparseness to A Girl Returned that emphasizes the narrator’s desolation. The prose and the descriptions therein both have the dulled colors of television and films from the 1970s, which also seems to telegraph the hazy nature of every adult’s memories of their teenaged years. Di Pietrantonio captures that feeling of helplessness from the age when you’re old enough to recognize the power of autonomy, but not quite old enough to get it. She’s completely trapped, with brothers who bully her and steal her food, with a mother who appears to have no affection for her, with a father who’s barely there, and with the teenager’s inability to see beyond the next few months. In her case, the light at the end of the tunnel is closer than she realizes, as she’s going to get a chance to move away to attend secondary school before the novel is out, but the combination of the change in circumstances and environments is so dramatic that she can’t see her way out of it.
The twists and turns that come the narrator’s way in this slim novel mean that she never has time to wallow in her misery, at least not on the page, before something else happens, good or bad. It’s all plausible, but the story is condensed enough to keep the novel moving well, even in the most introspective parts where the narrator is pondering how she ended up in this situation.
The result is a coming-of-age story in miniature, taking just a small amount of time, a bit more than a year in the narrator’s life, where a significant number of things ends up happening to her. It’s oddly lovely for a story that’s certainly not a happy one, posing huge questions about identity and family, even as simple as what it really means to be a mother – or what it means to be part of a family. The narrator keeps talking about her two mothers, as if she’s uncertain what to call either of them. The novel offers no answers, simply ending the way a memory does. It’s substantial for a novel so slim, enough to leave you wanting more.
Next up: Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. I’ve never read it, or seen the movie, in fact.