Melancholy is that strange happiness of being sad. Something like that pointed Victor Hugo occasionally. But the matter has more substance than it seems. Melancholy is not only the longing for time that has expired, but also the disheartening sensation of the pending, of the unresolved.
Thus, melancholy has different degrees inasmuch as that other one that we were knew how to face his time with the success of the unscripted actor. Because with that other self we cannot act as pointers of his conscience.
This is how melancholy is born, with that distortion, with the impossible balance between guilt and yearnings. AND Nadia Terranova delves into the insurmountable abyss of the worst of absences, those that offer no reasons.
After a while without visiting her mother, Ida returns to Messina to help her tidy up the house she grew up in before putting it up for sale. Surrounded by objects and memories, she will have to decide which part of her past she retains and which one to let go.
Meanwhile, the ghost of their lives, the sudden disappearance of their father twenty years earlier, seems to haunt the rooms and be present in every crack, in the damp walls and in all the conversations and silences between mother and daughter.
Precise and delicate, this novel looks to the most intimate to illuminate the unknowns that mark an existence, those on which we build our identity: memory as a wound and as a refuge, abandonment and loss of innocence, the complexity of ties family and lovers… Finalist for the prestigious Strega award and praised by critics, this work places Nadia Terranova among the most interesting voices in today's Italian narrative.
You can now buy the novel "Goodbye ghosts", a book by Nadia Terranova, here: