23 Feb / A Sister’s Story by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, translated by Ann Goldstein [in Shelf Awareness]
Award-winning Italian writer Donatella Di Pietrantonio made her English-language debut with the lauded A Girl Returned, deftly translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (revered for her elegant Elena Ferrante translations). Author and translator return to the characters from their earlier collaboration with A Sister’s Story, another simmering, intense novel of dysfunctional relationships and destructive secrets that proves equally strong as a companion sequel or standalone title.
A literature professor at the University of Grenoble is pulled from her class to answer an urgent phone call. An unfamiliar voice urges her immediately back to coastal Pescara, Italy, where a terrible accident has befallen her younger sister, Adriana. Narrating the journey home, toward a fraught sororal reunion, the protagonist – writing intimately in first person, ignoring temporal linearity – reveals years of complications and connections shared (and not), especially between sisters.
Adriana and the narrator are the only daughters among five (living) children in a struggling, combative, working-class family. The narrator, however, was raised by an aunt and uncle in “the city” before being returned (the focus of A Girl Returned) as a teen. For much of their lives, Adriana “has never been tactful, she interjects herself into everything that has to do with me as if it were also hers,” the narrator observes. At 25, the narrator married Piero. Three years later, Adriana arrives “at the darkest moment before dawn,” expecting shelter for herself and nine-month-old Vincenzo (named after their dead brother), a nephew the narrator hadn’t known she even had.
“Adriana is an opportunist by instinct, not by calculation,” the narrator reflects, as Adriana inserts herself into their lives. She even invokes Piero’s family name – wealthy and respected – to her advantage in an attempt to escape her debt-ridden, violent lover. As self-absorbed as Adriana is, she watches her sister blindly forgive Piero’s absences. “Don’t be quiet anymore,” Adriana warns. “Think of your husband before someone else takes him.” But the narrator is perhaps too late, as cleavings seem inevitable: “There was something in me that summoned abandonments,” she surrenders. Now in middle age, her homegoing will determine what she might salvage – of relationships, but also of her own disconnected, denied self.
Di Pietrantonio radiantly conjures small, piercing moments that linger between characters, turning sparsely written pages into surprisingly dense examinations of resonating reactions and enduring consequences: a fish Adriana expertly guts and cooks, a tiny mosquito in a gelato shop, an errant hair mixed into tagliatelle. Her sharp examinations haunt and illuminate, transforming the quotidian into the indelibly literary.
Shelf Talker: Award-winning Italian novelist Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s second translated import is another piercing examination of dysfunctional family relationships that centers on sororal breaks and bonds.
Review: Shelf Awareness Pro, February 17, 2022
Readers: Adult
Published: 2020 (Italy), 2022 (United States)