Convergence and Departure: On Donatella Di Pietrantonio's "A Sister's Story"
Donatella Di Pietrantonio, transl. Ann Goldstein | A Sister’s Story | Europa Editions | 2022 | 176 Pages
There is perhaps no archetype of sisterly devotion as enduringly popular as Little Women’s March girls. “I could never love anyone as I love my sisters,” Jo, the second eldest, declares in the 1994 film adaptation. Her adoring oath sums up how we tend to recall the Marches—sanitized of their dirty tricks, jealousies, betrayals both minor and major.
What does it mean to love a sister as one loves no other? To consider the ferocity of this love is to contend with its risk. Perhaps this is what best friends and nearly-sisters Lenú and Lila, the protagonists of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, discover as they devour Little Women: “We read it for months, so many times that the book became tattered and sweat-stained, it lost its spine, came unthreaded, sections fell apart.” In the model of the March sisters, Lenú and Lila’s friendship is unrivaled, inimitable. But like the novel they love insatiably, whose pages they inadvertently ravage, their affection for one another has a startling capacity to destroy. For Ferrante, sisterly love is an affliction, a fever—it carries with it heat, rapacity, and hunger.
A Sister’s Story, a novel by the Italian author Donatella Di Pietrantonio, picks up Ferrante’s interest in fierce, fraught sisterhood. Di Pietrantonio shares with Ferrante a publisher (Europa), a translator (Ann Goldstein), and a tendency toward suspenseful, sparse prose. Like Ferrante’s, Di Pietrantonio’s novels are swiftly finding a growing audience abroad—and in this latest translation, her searing and lively narration reaches new heights.
A Sister’s Story opens with a return. Just before dawn, Adriana shows up at the house of her estranged older sister. Something is evidently awry: she’s dressed only in a gauzy nightgown, holds a baby swaddled in a bedsheet, and a chunk of her hair has been chopped off above her right ear. But just when we expect the nameless narrator to usher Adriana inside—to embrace, soothe, coo over and question—she falters.
Can Adriana stay the night? Maybe. “I’ll ask Piero,” the narrator evades, referring to her husband.
This moment might suggest a certain conjugal deference—but it is not so much in service of securing permission from her husband as of defending distance from her sister. (Adriana instantly knows this, contending, “Piero is good, he’ll want us for sure. Perhaps you don’t want us.”) Adriana presents an immediate threat to the narrator’s insistence on keeping her distance from the past: “Parents and brothers, the town in the hills, were far away, in the harshness of dialect. They occupied memories that were not happy, and barely encroached on the present. She, on the contrary, was always too alive and dangerous. I felt intensely the unease of being her sister.”
This slim novel proceeds like a thriller, introducing two mysterious journeys: Adriana’s to Abruzzo in the past, and the narrator’s to her hometown in the present. What are they running from and to? These puzzles are propulsive, but their payoff is limited. When we learn, for example, the story behind Adriana’s odd haircut—chopped off at knifepoint by a debt collector with the name of a cartoon villain, One-Eyed Santino—there is a certain predictable neatness to the story of credit, evasion, and consequence. More ominous is the palpable mystery before us: why Adriana’s sister, witnessing her in crisis, hesitates to invite her upstairs.
Di Pietrantonio sets the stage for this sisterly entanglement, with its conflicting desires and competing impulses, in her earlier novel A Girl Returned, which won the Campiello Strega and has been adapted into a film. A Sister’s Story is loosely its sequel, but the two don’t need to be read in order. A Girl Returned opens in August 1975, when a 13-year-old girl (a younger version of the narrator from A Sister’s Story) is dropped off at an unfamiliar house and swiftly abandoned by the people she believes to be her parents. This new family is her birth family, her real family, she is told. Names and relations instantly shift: mother becomes aunt, father becomes uncle, strangers become family, and the girl is nicknamed “arminuta,” (literally the “girl returned”).
This stunning change represents, for the narrating “arminuta,” both a remarkable withdrawal of maternal affection, (how could a mother “exchange a daughter like a toy”?), and an abrupt shift in class. She has been raised in the comfort of swimming pools, trips to the lido, dance classes. This crowded apartment in the farmlands, just a bus ride away, presents an entirely different world. Here, the children are tasked with arduous chores, fight over leftover food, and spend their summers picking fava beans in the field. When her “new” sister, Adriana, wets their shared bed at night, the narrator learns to curl around the spill, to seek comfort in its warmth, to become with Adriana “two bodies around a wet spot.” The scarce affection of their overworked, exhausted, and neglectful parents lead the sisters to seek in one another a wellspring of care and comfort. Their dependence takes physical form when they fall asleep curled together: “Every night, she lent me the sole of her foot to lean against my cheek. I had nothing else, in the darkness inhabited by breath.”
If in childhood the girls grow so close as to nearly merge, in adult life—as described in A Sister’s Story—they attempt a complete severance. They visit less and call infrequently, allowing distance to create a wedge between them. We never quite learn why, although perhaps these early scenes of intense reliance are to blame—they’ve needed each other so completely, each now craves the illusion of independence. “Maybe it was what we were secretly looking for: repose, shaking each other off,” the narrator thinks. She constructs a tidy life in Abruzzo, teaching Italian literature at a prestigious university. Her husband, Piero, is warm and affectionate, but aloof: “I never completely reached him in his separateness, never in his truth. I was afraid to push beyond appearances, calm as the water beyond the dunes of Cerrano.” Her marriage has a quality of capaciousness—a roomy distance utterly unlike her childhood intimacy with Adriana.
Adriana, meanwhile, moves to the fishing town of Borgo Sud, where she marries a swaggering, swarthy sailor. Rafael is “like a bull,” Adriana declares, boasting of their passionate sex life. Her zest, verve, and appetite for the unruly defies the narrator’s orderly, manicured life: “Sometimes she’d ask, with a mixture of worry and pity: ‘Do you and Piero enjoy life?’”
The husbands, rendered in a few simple strokes, present a shorthand for the sister’s diverging lives. Piero is a dentist raised in the abundance of his father’s successful medical practice; he throws a fit when he finds a silky black hair curled around a strand of pasta. Rafael has the looks of “Michelangelo’s David,” with a sudden temper and tendency to disappear at sea for days. Revelations about Piero and Rafael propel major plot points, although the men themselves remain mysterious, murky, and most alive as representations of each sister’s fantasy.
At times, compounding plot lines distract from the text’s more urgent and expansive question: What does it mean to separate from a sister? Even in their careful distance, the reader senses each sister keeps the other present as an imagined companion and eternal adversary. When they meet and flaunt their opposite ways of living, each inadvertently reveal the degree to which they have made her choices in defiance of the other’s. Sister, in this sense, is the person you build a life in response to.
Neither woman has the satisfaction of outdoing the other. Each is humbled by life, by the “laws that rule the movement of the stars and the cycles of the season.” But more than by odd and arresting circumstances, by husbands or by paychecks, they are humbled by their need for each other, and their failure to disentangle. When the narrator considers her life, a jumbled sequence of tragedies and triumphs, she cannot help but credit her sister as its connecting thread: “If she hadn’t arrived, who knows, maybe all the rest wouldn’t have happened.”