A Girl Returned

June 3, 2019
In her first U.S.-published work, Di Pietrantonio (My Mother Is a River) tells the spellbinding story of a girl whose life is upended by a shift in her family. In August of 1975, the unnamed 13-year-old narrator is dropped off at the apartment of her birth family in a nameless Italian town by the man that she believed to be her father but who is, in fact, only a distant cousin of her biological father. She is given no reason for being taken from the only home that she has known and given to a loveless family that she’s never met. Though she comes to love her newfound younger sister, Adriana, and her baby brother, Giuseppe, and has a few adventures—rides at a festival, returning to her home city for a birthday party for her friend Patrizia—her existence is mostly one of befuddlement, anger, and sadness. The narrative covers a little over a year, and while these vignettes do not form a plot any more than they would in anyone’s life, the narrator does eventually come to understand her adoptive mother’s choice and come to a rapprochement with her. Occasional, brief comments from the narrator as an adult reveal that she has attained a modicum of normalcy. Still, her description of herself is heart-rending: “I was a child of separations, false or unspoken kinships, distances.” Goldstein’s translation flows smoothly, giving American readers a glimpse of a different time and place. Di Pietrantonio’s story has the feel of a memoir as much as literary fiction; it perfectly captures an unusual situation in one girl’s life.

June 1, 2019
In this slim novel by award-winning Italian author Di Pietrantonio, her first translated into English, a 13-year-old girl raised by distant relatives as their own is sent abruptly back to her birth family with little explanation. The book opens with the unnamed narrator carrying a suitcase and a bag of shoes up the stairs to an apartment where the door is stuck closed. At last a child with untidy hair opens it. "She was my sister, but I had never seen her." The man she has until now believed to be her father is dropping her off. In the dining room, her birth mother receives her without ceremony or interest, not bothering to get up from her chair. When the girl runs back down to the car, desperate to convince her erstwhile father to take her back ("Mamma's sick, she needs my help. I'm not staying here, I don't know those people"), he removes her bodily from the front seat and drives away. "The tire marks and I remained on the asphalt....The air smelled of burning rubber. When I raised my head, someone from the family that was mine against my will was looking down from the second-floor windows." Raised an only child in a comfortable, middle-class home, accustomed to days at the beach and dance lessons, she finds herself in an apartment crowded with violent strangers. There's not enough to eat, and no bed has been arranged for her. She sleeps on a mattress stuffed with sheep's wool, holding the sole of her sister's foot against her cheek: "I had nothing else, in that darkness inhabited by breath." In spare, haunting prose, Di Pietrantonio shows a girl struggling not only to understand, but to survive and belong. "You haven't known poverty," her birth mother tells her, "poverty is more than hunger." Class inequality, misogyny, and sexism are all at work as well. Late in the novel, in a scene both harrowing and illuminating, her two worlds overlap when she and her sister visit the house of the woman who raised her. A gripping, deeply moving coming-of-age novel; immensely readable, beautifully written, and highly recommended.

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