RaveAsymptote... a carefully crafted meditation on familial ties and the pernicious effects of unprocessed trauma ... It is to Terranova’s great merit that she is able to capture trauma’s potential to stop time in such a limpid manner ... Terranova’s sense of space, in fact, is masterful. The novel invests much in domestic topography and the urban cityscape. From the symbolic weight conferred on Ida’s house and the repairs that its crumbling roof must undergo, to its keen musings on the intersections between place and identity, Farewell, Ghosts manages to be supremely situated in the Sicily of Greek origins, droughts, and seasonal winds while also speaking to the universal human experience of rootedness and its attending anxieties ... In the end, Farewell, Ghosts is a success. I mean this primarily in two senses. It is, first, a literary success: a tale of homecoming both so familiar and devastatingly new that it is sure to gain Terranova a robust following among English-speaking audiences. In another sense, however, a rarer one, it is a tale of success.
Elena Ferrante
RaveAsymptote JournalFerrante isn’t exactly charting new territory here, and yet, as an undisputed master in rendering the familiar strange, her prose packs a punch just when we are about to settle into a sense of familiarity. With the publication of The Lying Life of Adults, we see an author at her peak, deftly synthetizing the density of her first three novels with the sprawling quality of the Neapolitan Novels, all while managing to uncover complex and challenging human truths ... The story is told in the first person, as are all of Ferrante’s novels. It’s hard to imagine otherwise at this point; prose, for her, serves as a conduit for the most rigorous kind of self-examination, often dragging us into psychic places we’d rather not inhabit ... Ferrante aims to shock, and she aims to please. But she also aims to critique ... I’d like to think that these pages serve as a warning. A warning that the fight for feminist autonomy waged in the seventies...and innumerable other struggles for social betterment that have consumed whole generations, are not work of the past. That women, more than ever, are subject to the ascriptions of men around them. All that is left to us, Ferrante seems to be saying, is revolt.
