By Enrica Maria Ferrara and Stiliana Milkova Rousseva
Nadia Terranova’s 2022 novel The Night Trembles (Trema la notte), translated in English by Ann Goldstein for Seven Stories Press (2025), gives voice to Barbara and Nicola, a young woman and a boy whose parallel plot lines develop against the background of a catastrophic natural disaster – the earthquake that decimated the cities of Messina and Reggio Calabria, on each side of the Strait of Messina, on December 28, 1908. Terranova, a contemporary Italian writer from Messina, has been mapping in her narratives the topographies of trauma – personal and collective – of her hometown and her native Sicily (Todesco and Milkova Rousseva, 2022).
The Night Trembles consists of 24 chapters, with the first, “Prelude,” and the last, “November 1919,” framing the other 22. The titles of these 22 chapters where the main events of 1908-1909 unfold, take the names of the 22 major Arcana of the Tarot card deck, but are not organized in the numerical sequence of the cards, following instead a non-linear order signposting or anticipating the plot developments. Each chapter opens with an epigraph in italics describing the titular card and offering a secondary narrative frame, nesting inside the primary one.
These descriptions, as we find out from the “Notes” at the end of the novel, come from the anonymously-authored book Meditation on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism and provide an important paratext inviting symbolic, esoteric readings. In this way, the novel functions as a form of narrative oracle inscribed in the structure of the text. The Arcana are present within the plot proper as well, through the divination of the charming Madame, the fortune teller who is also the herald of both literal and metaphoric salvation.
The narration alternates between Barbara’s story, told in first-person, and Nicola’s story, in third person, moving with a linear, reassuring pace that harnesses our expectations to a horizon of certainty while everything else – buildings, churches, bridges, matter – crumbles around them. And through this narration, each character reclaims his or her agency.
Barbara, the young aspiring writer and first-person narrator, breaks the silence imposed on women by centuries of oblivion. She speaks on behalf of all women whose voices have been suffocated, her voice rising from the debris of the ruined city and from the “ruins of History.” To quote scholar Katrin Wehling-Giorgi on Natalia Ginzburg, through the character of Barbara, Terranova creates a narrative identity that “provides an unassumingly powerful alternative to the omniscient, male-authored account of historical events.”
It is not a coincidence then that her role model and inspiration is a little-known 19th-century writer from Messina – Letteria Montorio – whose novel Maria Landini Barbara brings along to Messina after a vain attempt to put it in her father’s hands when he sees her off at the train station. Montoro’s novel, as Barbara summarizes it, tells the story of a woman who refuses the traditional role of wife and mother, claiming instead her independence and running away from her family. And as we find out, Barbara is herself trying to run away from an arranged marriage, going to Messina to visit her grandmother and intending not to return home to her father.
After the earthquake, Barbara visits Letteria Montorio’s tomb and there she happens upon the writer’s photograph (presumably from her tombstone) amidst the ruins of the cemetery. When asked by a friend if the woman in the picture is her mother, Barbara confirms. Thus the writer from Messina becomes Barbara’s symbolic mother. While in her 2018 novel Farewell, Ghosts (translated by Ann Goldstein), Terranova dramatizes the chase of a symbolic, phantasmatic father so that the protagonist Ida could measure herself “with the patriarchal order and accept or reform its law” (Ferrara, 2022), in The Night Trembles Barbara chooses Montorio as her symbolic mother or one of her co-mothers: “donne che si fanno madri l’una dell’altra” (“women who become each other’s mother”) and not only women who have given birth but also “sorelle d’anima, zie, compagne di strada” (“soul sisters, aunts, comrades,” 111), a concept that Terranova further develops in her magnificent novel shortlisted for the 2025 Strega Prize, Quello che so di te (What I Know About You).
As she accepts Letteria Montorio’s legacy, the protagonist of The Night Trembles rejects the destiny her father had chosen for her: to be married and to remain confined within the private space of the house, a space traditionally assigned to women. Her arrival in Messina to stay with her broad-minded, educated grand-mother (another symbolic mother), seems a kind of rebirth, a merging into one of Barbara and the city: “I walked, head high, in the Messina evening, the voice inside me growing always louder, firm, my breast made more prominent: I was transformed into rock, into one of the cliffs of the crescent-shaped part of the city, I would hold back the winds and stop the waters, conquering the opposing currents” (23). Barbara’s rebellion, however, constitutes an act of hubris and she is punished that same night when catastrophe strikes.
On the other hand, Nicola’s fate resembles that of many other children (and is not unlike Barbara’s): his voice is silenced and dismissed in the world of adults. But in his case, the invisibility conferred by childhood takes on the gloomy colors of a gothic fairy tale, oppressive like the atmosphere of the windowless cellar where the boy is put to sleep at night time, enveloped in pitch-black darkness that “ate the air in his lungs” (29). Born after many years of waiting, in a family that “originated in a contract” (12), ruled by “perversions and complicity” (12), Nicola is suffocated by the love of his mother, Maria, a woman driven by “the desire to assert herself over men” (12) and terrified by the prospect of losing her only child, her trophy and chosen victim. Putting him to sleep on a very tall catafalque, his feet and hands tied by holy ropes, is Maria’s solution to cheat the devil who will take Nicola for dead. Every night, the child has terrible nightmares populated by slimy and growling monsters who speak to him with Maria’s carnivorous voice: “A creature half jellyfish, half snarl arrived above the bier and, stopping a few centimeters from his face, opened a gigantic mouth full of sharp teeth. His mother’s voice devoured him” (31). Even before losing his speech due to the traumas that he and Barbara suffer, Nicola has been already silenced, possessed as he is by Maria’s voice.
Nicola’s aphonia brings to mind Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973), a text which Terranova certainly had to reckon with given its use of the tarot cards as a tool for divination and storytelling. Having lost their speech due to a magic spell, the knights who convene in Calvino’s castle communicate with each other through the images of a tarot deck. Laying the cards on the table, every knight tells his own story which the reader simultaneously visualizes through the illustrations of major and minor Arcana framing the text. In the map elaborated by Calvino, the Hanged Man tarot card which marks the beginning of Nicola’s path from the cellar of his paternal home through his aphonia and towards the construction of his new identity is that of Orlando, the paladin of Ariosto’s poem who turns mad for love. The overlap between Orlando and the Hanged Man alludes to Bertolt Brecht’s principle of ‘reversibility’ on which Calvino’s poetics is mostly grounded (Ferrara, 2014). “Leave me like this. I have come full circle and I understand. The world must be read backward. All is clear,” says the paladin “strung up by his feet” (32) in The Castle. This reversal of the oppositional pairs reason/madness and order/chaos is instrumental also to comprehending the obsessive rationality of the tarot card scheme which Calvino devised to harness his combinatory effort.
That the Hanged Man is the first tarot card introduced (in chapter 2) suggests that chaos is immediately established as the regulatory mechanism of reality in a world in which the earthquake transforms human beings into “non-dead […] silhouettes without edges in clouds of fiery smoke and debris” (55). At first glance, Barbara and Nicola, two earthquake survivors on the facing shores of the Strait of Messina, are free to invent for themselves from the debris of the past a new identity, different from the one intended for them by their respective parents. But their freedom is deceptive, because Barbara and Nicola suffer inhuman violence which will determine their future.
When Barbara comes to amidst the ruins of a city devastated by the earthquake, her fate is indicated by the Tower, the tarot card symbolizing hubris, the arrogance of man who dares to erect a tall building “to replace revelation from heaven by what he himself has fabricated” (51), clearly a reference to the Tower of Babel, an act which inevitably seals man’s fall from power. The allusion here is not only to the earthquake as divine punishment (the way natural disasters have tended to be interpreted since antiquity), but also to the violence inflicted on Barbara and other women in the ravaged city. As if the rebellion against the law of the father proclaimed by Barbara at the opening of the novel has caused, as punishment, the collapse of the Tower and the fall into the abyss of patriarchal violence.
The father, on the other hand, is the ghost that haunts Barbara, the way the father haunts Ida, the protagonist of Terranova’s Farewell, Ghosts. But while in the earlier book Ida literally follows the steps and itineraries of her missing father as a way of coming to terms with his absence and her own painful past (Milkova 2021), The Night Trembles offers a different scenario of women coping with trauma: to emerge from the wreckage of the patriarchal city with its male violence is to accept, decisively and definitively, a feminine identity, to leave behind the father and his name, and to entrust yourself to a support network created by women.
The book adopts an intensely poetic style – and indeed, Serena Todesco has discussed Terranova’s particular poetics of ruins – especially in the descriptions of the earthquake where the author opts for a literary register often punctuated by rarefied lexical choices that confer a pensive rhythm to an otherwise dynamic narration moving between the two parallel stories.
The text’s intention to situate Barbara within a women’s literary genealogy – with references to Letteria Montoro and Matilde Serao – is in line with Terranova’s profound commitment to the rediscovery of great women writers in an Italian publishing landscape dominated almost exclusively by men in the last two centuries. Examples include: Terranova’s prefaces to Fabrizia Ramondino’s Guerra di infanzia e di Spagna (War of Childhood and Spain, 2001) reprinted by Fazi in 2022, Alba De Céspedes’s Prima e dopo (Before and after) and Quaderno proibito (Forbidden Notebook, translated by Ann Goldstein for Pushkin Press, 2024) reprinted by Cliquot and Mondadori in 2023; the series “Mosche d’oro” which Terranova used to co-direct for the publishing house Giulio Perrone, including biographies of women written by women; the literary magazine ‘K’ co-edited by Terranova in which particular attention is given to contemporary stories written by women. And in her preface to the new edition of Dacia Maraini’s La vacanza (2021), Terranova even compares the rare event of a woman’s authorship to an earthquake: “Every book authored by a woman is a scandal, every book a woman publishes – the breaking news of an earthquake […] I think that every woman who writes in Italy today must silently thank the women writers before her who have struggled to open passages previously inaccessible to all of them” (our translation, 6). Likewise, The Night Trembles establishes a feminine genealogy, linking the women writers of the past to those of the (novel’s) present.
Nadia Terranova pays tribute to another contemporary woman writer, Elena Ferrante, who in her book In The Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing (I margini e il dettato, e/o, 2022) calls for the rescue of women’s “literary patrimony,” for the dissolving (smarginatura) of the entrenched forms they have inherited from a predominantly male-authored and male-centered literary tradition. Terranova’s English translator, Ann Goldstein, is also Ferrante’s, continuing a genealogy of women writers and women translators arising from the “Ferrante-Goldstein phenomenon” in the Anglophone world (Milkova 2016). On two distinct occasions in The Night Trembles we find the adjective “smarginato” (“without edges,” 55; “without borders,” 99), a keyword in Ferrante’s poetics with which Terranova joins Ferrante’s project of constructing female subjectivity and authorship. Unsilencing Barbara’s voice is therefore part of a larger design to renew women’s literary tradition and at the same time renew our belief in “the sense of magic and wonder we feel when faced with something we cannot control”– which is also the function Terranova assigns to the Tarot cards within the text’s architecture.
Nicola’s perspective, as the innocent male child, challenges the binary division of responsibility which traditionally places all the blame on the patriarch, the male figure of authority; indeed, he is the victim of an asphyxiating maternal affection until he discovers, after the earthquake and the loss of his biological family, that there are other forms of love. In his life before, Nicola is suffocated, quite literally, by the intense and pervasive fragrance of the bergamot perfume his father has created and sells. It’s a nauseating, oppressive aroma which the boy leaves behind when he leaves Sicily to find a new, real family. Moreover, The Night Trembles, as the title already suggests, is a novel grounded in a sensual overload – auditory, visual, olfactory, and tactile excess immerses the readers in the narrated events, in Messina’s specific time and space, but also in the universal time and space of a natural disaster.
The novel’s narrative frame – the first and last chapters that support the plot – offers a metatextual surprise. Barbara is given the authority of a writer who narrates not only her own experiences as a woman and marginalized figure, but also those of others, including Nicola. What we are reading is the book Barbara is writing: it is her voice that contains, and in fact, augments Nicola’s, making it therefore audible, narratable. And if we consider the novel’s architecture and the strategic deployment of the Tarot cards as both a structural and a paratextual frame, then the fortuneteller is none other than Barbara herself. Selecting and arranging the cards, the writer avails herself of the powers of divination and storytelling, narrating the lives of others to stop the night from trembling.
Terranova, Nadia. The Night Trembles. Translated by Ann Goldstein. Seven Stories Press, 2025.
An earlier version of this review was published in Italian on Simposio Italiano on May 29, 2022. The review was modified and translated in English by the authors.
Enrica Ferrara is a writer, translator and scholar lecturing at Trinity College Dublin. She has written widely about Italo Calvino, Elena Ferrante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Domenico Starnone and other leading Italian writers. Her most recent scholarly book was Posthumanism in Italian Literature and Film: Boundaries and Identity. Her debut novel in Italian, Mia madre aveva una Cinquecento gialla, was awarded the Rapallo prize for fiction in 2024. She is the co-founder and co-curator of FIILI, the Festival of Italian and Irish Literature in Ireland.
Stiliana Milkova Rousseva is a Bulgarian-born literary critic, translator, and writer. She is Professor of Comparative Literature at Oberlin College (USA).
Works Cited
Calvino, Italo, The Castle of Crossed Destinies. Translated by William Weaver. Picador, 1978.
Ferrara, Enrica Maria, Il realismo teatrale nella narrativa del Novecento: Vittorini, Pasolini, Calvino. Florence: Firenze University Press, 2014.
Ferrara, Enrica Maria. “Finding the Father: Marta Barone’s Sunken City, Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein.” Reading in Translation. May 2, 2022. https://readingintranslation.com/2022/05/02/marta-barones-sunken-city/
Ferrara, Enrica Maria. “In the Margins: on the Pleasures of Reading and Writing by Elena Ferrante.” World Literature Today. July 2022. https://worldliteraturetoday.org/2022/july/margins-pleasures-reading-and-writing-elena-ferrante
Maraini, Dacia. La vacanza. Rizzoli, 2021.
Milkova, Stiliana. “The Translator’s Visibility or the Ferrante-Goldstein Phenomenon,” Allegoria 73 (2016), 166-173.
Milkova, Stiliana. “Mediterranean Crossings: Nadia Terranova’s Farewell, Ghosts, Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein.” Reading in Translation. August 10, 2020. https://readingintranslation.com/2020/08/10/mediterranean-crossings-nadia-terranovas-farewell-ghosts-translated-from-italian-by-ann-goldstein/
Terranova, Nadia. Farewell, Ghosts. Translated by Ann Goldstein. Seven Stories Press, 2020.
Terranova, Nadia. “Lo studio degli Arcani e l’importanza dei luoghi: in dialogo con Nadia Terranova.” March 7, 2022. https://www.illibraio.it/news/dautore/nadia-terranova-intervista-1418797/
Terranova, Nadia. Quello che so di te. Guanda, 2025.
Todesco, Serena. “La terra si spacca.” Letterate Magazine. April 1, 2022. https://www.letteratemagazine.it/2022/04/01/la-terra-si-spacca/
Todesco, Serena and Stiliana Milkova Rousseva. “Walking Across Fears: Mapping the Topographies of Trauma in Nadia Terranova’s Narratives.” In Trauma Narratives in Italian and Transnational Women’s Writing, edited by Katrin Wehling-Giorgi and Tiziana de Rogatis, 265-289. Sapienza University Press, 2022.
Wehling-Giorgi, Katrin. “Forging the Female Voice out of the Ruins of History: Reading Natalia Ginzburg. Reading in Translation. February 22, 2021. https://readingintranslation.com/2021/02/22/forging-the-female-voice-out-of-the-ruins-of-history-reading-natalia-ginzburg/