{"id":9886,"date":"2023-04-19T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-04-19T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=9886"},"modified":"2023-04-18T23:35:51","modified_gmt":"2023-04-19T03:35:51","slug":"a-girl-returned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2023\/04\/19\/a-girl-returned\/","title":{"rendered":"A Girl Returned."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Donatella di Pietrantonio\u2019s 2019 novel A Girl Returned<\/a> <\/em>(L\u2019Arminuta<\/em>) was translated into English by Ann Goldstein, the translator for Elena Ferrante\u2019s 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\u2019s pretty great, though, reminiscent of the better parts of Ferrante\u2019s work in themes and setting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The title refers to the narrator, who learns at the start of the novel that she\u2019s going to go back to her biological parents, people she doesn\u2019t know at all because she\u2019s 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\u2019t necessarily afford to feed. She gets very little explanation of why she\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a sparseness to A Girl Returned<\/em> that emphasizes the narrator\u2019s 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\u2019s memories of their teenaged years. Di Pietrantonio captures that feeling of helplessness from the age when you\u2019re old enough to recognize the power of autonomy, but not quite old enough to get it. She\u2019s 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\u2019s barely there, and with the teenager\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019t see her way out of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n <\/script> \n \n\n\n\n

The twists and turns that come the narrator\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s life, where a significant number of things ends up happening to her. It\u2019s oddly lovely for a story that\u2019s certainly not a happy one, posing huge questions about identity and family, even as simple as what it really means to be a mother \u2013 or what it means to be part of a family. The narrator keeps talking about her two mothers, as if she\u2019s uncertain what to call either of them. The novel offers no answers, simply ending the way a memory does. It\u2019s substantial for a novel so slim, enough to leave you wanting more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next up: Patricia Highsmith\u2019s The Talented Mr. Ripley<\/a><\/em>. I\u2019ve never read it, or seen the movie, in fact.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Donatella di Pietrantonio\u2019s 2019 novel A Girl Returned (L\u2019Arminuta) was translated into English by Ann Goldstein, the translator for Elena Ferrante\u2019s 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\u2019s pretty great, though, reminiscent of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[505,161,174],"class_list":["post-9886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-coming-of-age-novels","tag-highly-recommended","tag-italian-literature","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9886"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9887,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9886\/revisions\/9887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}