Forever, Elsewhere—A Review

Mental illness wreaks devastation. Migration tears at those who leave and those who stay. The wounds are deep. Yet this novel reveals something else: there exists a balm (to borrow Etty Hillesum's word) that can soothe them, those terrible wounds—simply being there together. Set in the 1950s in a small town in northern Italy, the story centers on Berta, a young woman who emigrates to Switzerland, where mental illness strikes for the first time. Her father brings her home. What follows is a journey through doctors, asylums, pain, memory, and a family and circle of friends—almost entirely women—for whom one woman's crisis becomes everyone's. One woman's fragile smile becomes the smile of them all.