Translations

In Ridammi il sole author Carla Gagliardi reflects on the unthinkable advent of a life-threatening illness in her mid-thirties. The book moves rapidly from one memory to another in the years leading up to and following her diagnosis. With a light and fluid touch, Gagliardi focuses on the description of her own forward movement, her sense of purpose and determination as a means to navigate the challenging environment of a single woman seeking gainful and meaningful employment in Northern Italy (where careers for people graduating with degrees in literature are exceedingly rare). 

In a sense her diagnosis gives shape to the book, which explores events both before and after she learns she has inherited a form of a leukemia that killed her father. Though the book does not linger on extensive descriptions of her illness, everything she recounts reverberates with its impact. And yet the book resists despair; in each remembered conversation, in the most fleeting sketches of a luncheon, Gagliardi offers brightness, the sweetness of time with friends, and minor epiphanies reached through independent and unexpected vicissitudes. She offers a rewriting of a life – told in brief flashes – as seen through the rupture of the day she learns the nature of her disease.

Sifting through the effects and implications of her illness, Gagliardi pursues a larger story about the interruption of a human will, her own, a formidable will shaped by the terrain of her childhood, activism, and years of working multiple jobs to forge a career. Ridammi il sole extends hope for recovery in multiple senses, including for one’s capacity to change.    

-Jessica Harkins, translator note