Linda Ferri, Enchantments

Linda Ferri, Enchantments. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.

In her first novel, Enchantments, Linda Ferri draws us swiftly into the textured, colorful world of a young Italian girl coming of age in Paris. The tight roman a clef is expertly translated by novelist John Casey.

Since the unnamed narrator is a child everything seems new and interesting, worthy of comment; but the reader must be careful, because if she were to attribute this quality simply to childhood she could miss the precision with which Ferri chooses each detail. The opening zaps us into the narrator's world with the first line: "Here comes the cradle covered with white muslin sailing into my room." This carefree image signals the arrival of a new baby sister, Clara, who grows to be the narrator's partner in crime, her playmate and confidant; the sisters are as "one single being." Ferri uses their relationship to convey much more than childhood joy. In four short pages Ferri encapsulates the complicated dynamic not only of siblings, but of trying to grow up trapped by noise, people, her own feelings of unworthiness. Throughout, the narrator is concerned with her place in the world, her role in religion, her relation to God. She wants to know how to be good, how to interpret life. And although this first image of her sister is peaceful, the short chapter ends with a "faithful echo of the persistent screaming of my sister."

We align immediately with the narrator even as she has difficultly aligning with others. Her family moves to Paris from Italy; takes trips America to visit her mother's family; returns to Italy for visits. Not only is one of her parents always foreign (her mother is American and her father Italian) but the narrator and her siblings are marked by the multiple languages they speak, the multiple cultures they are familiar with. She says, "For some reason, wherever I went I wasn't like most people."

The narrator's outward reaction to cultural displacement is symptomatic of her discomfort in her own skin. At first she longs deeply for any connection. When she meets another child, she immediately foresees "endless friendship, total intimacy." She wants someone to understand, to disprove the "unpleasant feeling that nothing in me was there for a reason." Her greatest fear is not meaning anything. She does not even name herself, while the other characters in the book are given names, and often nicknames. When she receives a life-size doll she says it is her twin, "only much more fascinating than I." She names the doll Esmeralda.

As the novel's themes deepen, the narrator's body, and bodies in general, distance her further from the world. Her brothers' tickle-torturing of her and Clara becomes dangerously sexual with one holding them down while the other "runs his fingers up and down our whole body." She has been told to fear gypsies in the bushes and men in the park with raincoats. The danger is not the sex itself, but its relation to power, male power. She immediately foresees "the risk I would run by growing up and becoming a woman."

Throughout the novel we see her male guardians wearing overcoats like the men in the park; although she does not verbalize it, perhaps the question is, how she is supposed to know who to trust? This quandary reflects the most complex relationship in the novel: between the narrator and her father. She fears him when she is about to be punished, she adores him when he returns from trips. She evidently loves him, yet says that she would "like him better if he were a woman." And this, she worries, makes her "like that Judas person." He is unreachable to her, otherworldly. And although that distances them, it also brings them together. He is unknowable, but so is she. The confusion of this relationship, its complexity in terms of other male/female relationships, gives the tragedy that ends the book its power.

Ultimately we find ourselves hoping, like this unnamed narrator, that we are not forgotten, but instead loved. That we deserve a name.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Fairleigh Dickinson University
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group