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nathanshuherk's review against another edition
5.0
I would‰ЫЄve gained more having read her first two books, but this was still an incredibly interesting and unique read. Reading her thoughts, especially the changes over a quarter century, of her fame as an anonymous person is so fascinating in our current age. Would absolutely recommend to anyone interested in writing, regardless of their desire for fame. And anyone that has a public persona, this has critical insights and evaluations that extend beyond (her) literature
maxwelldunn's review against another edition
4.0
If anything, this book confirmed my absolute love for and devotion to Elena Ferrante. Not written for the intention of publication, Frantumaglia is a collection of correspondences, interviews, and essays. In it (and more importantly in her novels), Ferrante proves herself to not only be one of the greatest writers of the last fifty years, but also one of its greatest thinkers. She writes with conviction and humility. What I wouldn't give to sit down to a meal with her, whoever she is. I don't care if we ever truly know who Ferrante is, as long as she continues to publish. And if she doesn't, thank God we have her existing body of work to devour over and over again. 4.5 stars
Sidenote: Don't read this book until you've read all of Ferrante's novels (Troubling Love, The Days of Abandonment, The Lost Daughter, and The Neapolitan Quartet). It includes some spoilers, and I believe you'll have a greater appreciation for it knowing what exactly she is discussing in her interviews.
Sidenote: Don't read this book until you've read all of Ferrante's novels (Troubling Love, The Days of Abandonment, The Lost Daughter, and The Neapolitan Quartet). It includes some spoilers, and I believe you'll have a greater appreciation for it knowing what exactly she is discussing in her interviews.
anabrca's review against another edition
5.0
Frantumaglia passou a fazer parte do meu vocabulario.
Este livro é um conjunto de cartas trocadas com editores, leitores e entrevistas dadas a varios jornais e revistas literarias do mundo.
Se eu, leitora, cansei so de ler quantas vezes ela teve que responder o porquê ela escolheu um pseudônimo e nao quer aparecer em publico, imagine ela...
Aumentou a minha lista de livros para ler, peguei nomes de varias autoras italianas.
Ela gosta de Clarice Lispector, Elsa Morante, Virginia Woolf e Alice Munro e eu também.
#FerranteFever
Este livro é um conjunto de cartas trocadas com editores, leitores e entrevistas dadas a varios jornais e revistas literarias do mundo.
Se eu, leitora, cansei so de ler quantas vezes ela teve que responder o porquê ela escolheu um pseudônimo e nao quer aparecer em publico, imagine ela...
Aumentou a minha lista de livros para ler, peguei nomes de varias autoras italianas.
Ela gosta de Clarice Lispector, Elsa Morante, Virginia Woolf e Alice Munro e eu também.
#FerranteFever
brigittesbookshelf's review against another edition
4.0
I love learning about the creative writing process, and as an ardent fan of the Neapolitan Quartet, Ferrante’s commentary on her characters, setting, and methodology is engrossing and provocative. The only Ferrante I’ve yet to read is Troubling Love, and Frantumaglia has reinforced the former’s place at the top of my list. This book’s format, a collection of interviews, can be repetitive, as Ferrante repeatedly answers the same questions from different journalists. Ferrante comes off at times as rather eccentric, with a dissonant interplay of egotism and (sometimes performative?) modesty. Nevertheless, there are nuggets of gold to be found within her musings, and to glean anything more of the elusive Ferrante is a delight to this devoted fan.
avitalgadcykman's review against another edition
5.0
I read it in English: Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey
Emails, interviews-she is sharp and intriguing, definitely not an easy person-but she is not apologizing for it, her views are profoundly explained and her insight into the psyche is amazing. there are many repetitions-especially because she has to answer again and again why she publishes anonymously. Her comments about writing clarified to me something I have felt before without articulating it.
Emails, interviews-she is sharp and intriguing, definitely not an easy person-but she is not apologizing for it, her views are profoundly explained and her insight into the psyche is amazing. there are many repetitions-especially because she has to answer again and again why she publishes anonymously. Her comments about writing clarified to me something I have felt before without articulating it.
lapis's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
mysterious
reflective
3.5
There's a lot I could say about this:
1. This is a look at Ferrante through letters and interviews.
2. They are very context-dependent, just read the wikipedia page if you haven't read her books and are for some reason despite that interested in this.
3. Skip the first 50% if all you've read are the Neapolitan Novels because without context, you will be Very confused.
I plan on revisiting this some time after I've read her other works and maybe some of her named influences.
1. This is a look at Ferrante through letters and interviews.
2. They are very context-dependent, just read the wikipedia page if you haven't read her books and are for some reason despite that interested in this.
3. Skip the first 50% if all you've read are the Neapolitan Novels because without context, you will be Very confused.
I plan on revisiting this some time after I've read her other works and maybe some of her named influences.
arirang's review against another edition
4.0
"You say it's necessary to do interviews, at least, and that's fine, you're right. Tell Fofi to send me the questions, I'll answer. In these ten years I hope I've grown up.
In my own defence, however, I will say only this: in the games with newspapers one always ends up lying and at the root of the lie is the need to offer oneself to the public in the best form, with thoughts suitable to the role, with the makeup we imagine is suitable."
Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey starts with the much-quoted letter that the author known as [a:Elena Ferrante|44085|Elena Ferrante|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/f_50x66-6a03a5c12233c941481992b82eea8d23.png] wrote to her publishers in 1991, at the time her first book was written:
"I won’t participate in discussions and conferences, if I’m invited. I won’t go and accept prizes, if any are awarded to me. I will never promote the book, especially on television, not in Italy or, as the case may be, abroad. I will be interviewed only in writing, but I would prefer to limit even that to the indispensable minimum
I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t."
And it ends with a, I suspect deliberately provocative, "About the Author" section, which simply lists her published books followed by several blank pages.
However, as the opening quote, from a similar letter but written 10 years late at the time of her 2nd novel, suggests, Ferrante did ultimately soften her stance. Increasingly she answered questions from journalists on her books, and indeed questions on her anonymity, although any requests for biographical detail were curtly dismissed, quoting [a:Italo Calvino|155517|Italo Calvino|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1474566352p2/155517.jpg]'s “Ask me what you want to know, but I won’t tell you the truth, of that you can be sure.”
Many of her replies were lengthy expositions on her works, not really tailor-made for newspaper publication, often not even sent to the journalist. In one case she manages to answer five brief, albeit open-ended, questions from a magazine with a 70 page analysis of her first two books.
And it is this piece, printed in this volume, that gives rise both to the title of this book and indeed its very origin as she accepts (or rather doesn't refuse) her publisher's suggestion to publish the piece and similar correspondence as a book, describing it not so much as a stand-alone work but rather an appendix to her novels, "a sort of slightly dense afterword."
The book we have in English is this original book updated for the publication of Ferrante's later novels, right up to her latest, in English and Italian, the Neapolitan Quartet (which incidentally she regards as a single novel).
"Frantumuglia" is a term her mother used to describe "contradictory sensations that were tearing her apart ... a jumble of fragments", much like the condition experienced by Lila in My Beautiful Friend. But Ferrante increasingly used the term in interviews to describe the origin of her own writing, "fragments of memory. ... bits and pieces whose origin is difficult to pinpoint, and which make a noise in your head, sometimes causing discomfort. ... splinters of a possible narrative" from which she pieces together a story.
Ferrante's manifesto of anonymity does raise some rather challenging issues.
Crucially, and as many of her interviewers point out, far from distracting attention from the author's identity, the sense of mystery created has actually served to focus attention on it: rare is the review (including, regrettably, mine) of a Ferrante novel that doesn't at least mention the topic. And that in turn begs the question of whether the whole concept isn't actually designed to drum up publicity.
She responds rather aggressively to journalists raising this, pointing out that they raised the topic not her and claiming her readers (as opposed to journalists) don't care. But one of the longest and certainly the most revealing interview in the book [largely because it is a genuine two-way conversation rather than simply answers with no opportunity for the questioner to follow-up on points raised] is between Ferrante and her Italian publishers (*), and they also spend as much time discussing the issue of her anonymity as they do her works.
Indeed reading between the lines one does rather conclude that the author herself would genuinely prefer if no-one cared or wrote about her identity, whereas her publishers do, understandably, sense and to an extent exploit the commercial potential of the stance.
[* The Paris Review printed a shortened version of the same piece in their wonderful Art of Fiction series https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6370/elena-ferrante-art-of-fiction-no-228-elena-ferrante]
Ferrante's consistent stance is that the author of a book is not to be confused with the complete individual who wrote the books. There are parts of her in the novel but not all of her:
"I am not a supporter of the idea that the author is inessential. I would like only to decide what part of myself should be made public and what instead should remain private. I think that, in art, the life that counts is the life that remains miraculously alive in the works."
But interestingly she pushes back on the concept that the author itself can be absent from a novel, arguing that, in the Neopolitan books, "Elena" the author is different from "Elena" the narrator. She believes in the importance of "providing the reader with the elements that enable him to distinguish me from the narrating "I" ... The passionate reader deserves to be enabled to also extract the author's physiognomy from every word or grammatical violation or syntactical knot in the text, just has happens for characters, for a landscape, for a feeling, for a slow or agitated act...this seems to me much more than signing copies in a bookstore, defacing them with trite phrases."
Ferrante's anonymity has also led to many questions as to whether "Elena Ferrante" is more than just a pseudonym and actually a false front, that the limited biographical details she has acknowledged are false, that the pseudonym might disguise an already famous author, different people writing each book, or, most perniciously in Ferrante's eyes (and the one detail she insists in contradicting, since this would be a betrayal of her writing) that she may be a man.
As to the accusation that there may even be more than one writer using the pseudonym Ferrante, turns this back to support one of the very points her anonymity makes, that one has to work hard as a reader to detect the author if there is no picture on the cover:
The experts stare at the empty frame where the image of the author is supposed to be and they don’t have the technical tools, or, more simply, the true passion and sensitivity as readers, to fill that space with the works. So they forget that every individual work has its own story. Only the label of the name or a rigorous philological examination allows us to take for granted that the author of Dubliners is the same person who wrote Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The cultural education of any high school student should include the idea that a writer adapts depending on what he or she needs to express.
The other accusation sometimes levelled at Ferrante's novels is that they are little more than up-market chick-lit. This isn't helped by the branding and covers of the English editions:
This Frantamuglia very successfully refutes, mostly not by assertion but instead by the brilliance of Ferrante's writing on her own works, her themes, her influences, even unpublished sections from some of her works that explain her thought processes.
But she does admit to using tools to hook the reader while at the same time refusing the bounds of genre fiction:
I publish to be read. It’s the only thing that interests me about publication. So I employ all the strategies I know to capture the reader’s attention, stimulate curiosity, make the page as dense as possible and as easy as possible to turn.
But once I have the reader’s attention I feel it is my right to pull it in whichever direction I choose. I don’t think the reader should be indulged as a consumer, because he isn’t one. Literature that indulges the tastes of the reader is a degraded literature. My goal is to disappoint the usual expectations and inspire new ones.
And as a final point that struck me, she both neatly skewers the type of political writing that, e.g. won the 2016 Booker Prize:
"But what of any real political effect? In general it seems to me disappointing: a rhetorically complicit nudge given to a public that is already convinced."
and, through her comments on Silvio Berlusconi in 2002, anticipates the events of 2016:
"The construction of his figure as a democratically elected economic-political-television Duce will remain a perfectible, repeatable model...(He has) practically demonstrated that the interests off an individual can be installed overnight, thanks to a business group (not a political party), on top of the political dissatisfaction of half of Italy, higher classes and lower classes, passed off as a heroic story of national salvation and, above all, without extinguishing democratic assurances."
(Albeit in 2002 she attributes this to people suspending credulity and treating everything they are told as true, whereas to me 2016 is the pay-truth age where no one believes anything and so a lie or an unsubstantiated assertion is as valid as the truth or an expert opinion. )
Overall a wonderful "slightly dense afterword" to Ferrante's impressive novels, but best read if one is already familiar with them to get the most from it.
In my own defence, however, I will say only this: in the games with newspapers one always ends up lying and at the root of the lie is the need to offer oneself to the public in the best form, with thoughts suitable to the role, with the makeup we imagine is suitable."
Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey starts with the much-quoted letter that the author known as [a:Elena Ferrante|44085|Elena Ferrante|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/f_50x66-6a03a5c12233c941481992b82eea8d23.png] wrote to her publishers in 1991, at the time her first book was written:
"I won’t participate in discussions and conferences, if I’m invited. I won’t go and accept prizes, if any are awarded to me. I will never promote the book, especially on television, not in Italy or, as the case may be, abroad. I will be interviewed only in writing, but I would prefer to limit even that to the indispensable minimum
I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t."
And it ends with a, I suspect deliberately provocative, "About the Author" section, which simply lists her published books followed by several blank pages.
However, as the opening quote, from a similar letter but written 10 years late at the time of her 2nd novel, suggests, Ferrante did ultimately soften her stance. Increasingly she answered questions from journalists on her books, and indeed questions on her anonymity, although any requests for biographical detail were curtly dismissed, quoting [a:Italo Calvino|155517|Italo Calvino|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1474566352p2/155517.jpg]'s “Ask me what you want to know, but I won’t tell you the truth, of that you can be sure.”
Many of her replies were lengthy expositions on her works, not really tailor-made for newspaper publication, often not even sent to the journalist. In one case she manages to answer five brief, albeit open-ended, questions from a magazine with a 70 page analysis of her first two books.
And it is this piece, printed in this volume, that gives rise both to the title of this book and indeed its very origin as she accepts (or rather doesn't refuse) her publisher's suggestion to publish the piece and similar correspondence as a book, describing it not so much as a stand-alone work but rather an appendix to her novels, "a sort of slightly dense afterword."
The book we have in English is this original book updated for the publication of Ferrante's later novels, right up to her latest, in English and Italian, the Neapolitan Quartet (which incidentally she regards as a single novel).
"Frantumuglia" is a term her mother used to describe "contradictory sensations that were tearing her apart ... a jumble of fragments", much like the condition experienced by Lila in My Beautiful Friend. But Ferrante increasingly used the term in interviews to describe the origin of her own writing, "fragments of memory. ... bits and pieces whose origin is difficult to pinpoint, and which make a noise in your head, sometimes causing discomfort. ... splinters of a possible narrative" from which she pieces together a story.
Ferrante's manifesto of anonymity does raise some rather challenging issues.
Crucially, and as many of her interviewers point out, far from distracting attention from the author's identity, the sense of mystery created has actually served to focus attention on it: rare is the review (including, regrettably, mine) of a Ferrante novel that doesn't at least mention the topic. And that in turn begs the question of whether the whole concept isn't actually designed to drum up publicity.
She responds rather aggressively to journalists raising this, pointing out that they raised the topic not her and claiming her readers (as opposed to journalists) don't care. But one of the longest and certainly the most revealing interview in the book [largely because it is a genuine two-way conversation rather than simply answers with no opportunity for the questioner to follow-up on points raised] is between Ferrante and her Italian publishers (*), and they also spend as much time discussing the issue of her anonymity as they do her works.
Indeed reading between the lines one does rather conclude that the author herself would genuinely prefer if no-one cared or wrote about her identity, whereas her publishers do, understandably, sense and to an extent exploit the commercial potential of the stance.
[* The Paris Review printed a shortened version of the same piece in their wonderful Art of Fiction series https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6370/elena-ferrante-art-of-fiction-no-228-elena-ferrante]
Ferrante's consistent stance is that the author of a book is not to be confused with the complete individual who wrote the books. There are parts of her in the novel but not all of her:
"I am not a supporter of the idea that the author is inessential. I would like only to decide what part of myself should be made public and what instead should remain private. I think that, in art, the life that counts is the life that remains miraculously alive in the works."
But interestingly she pushes back on the concept that the author itself can be absent from a novel, arguing that, in the Neopolitan books, "Elena" the author is different from "Elena" the narrator. She believes in the importance of "providing the reader with the elements that enable him to distinguish me from the narrating "I" ... The passionate reader deserves to be enabled to also extract the author's physiognomy from every word or grammatical violation or syntactical knot in the text, just has happens for characters, for a landscape, for a feeling, for a slow or agitated act...this seems to me much more than signing copies in a bookstore, defacing them with trite phrases."
Ferrante's anonymity has also led to many questions as to whether "Elena Ferrante" is more than just a pseudonym and actually a false front, that the limited biographical details she has acknowledged are false, that the pseudonym might disguise an already famous author, different people writing each book, or, most perniciously in Ferrante's eyes (and the one detail she insists in contradicting, since this would be a betrayal of her writing) that she may be a man.
As to the accusation that there may even be more than one writer using the pseudonym Ferrante, turns this back to support one of the very points her anonymity makes, that one has to work hard as a reader to detect the author if there is no picture on the cover:
The experts stare at the empty frame where the image of the author is supposed to be and they don’t have the technical tools, or, more simply, the true passion and sensitivity as readers, to fill that space with the works. So they forget that every individual work has its own story. Only the label of the name or a rigorous philological examination allows us to take for granted that the author of Dubliners is the same person who wrote Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The cultural education of any high school student should include the idea that a writer adapts depending on what he or she needs to express.
The other accusation sometimes levelled at Ferrante's novels is that they are little more than up-market chick-lit. This isn't helped by the branding and covers of the English editions:
This Frantamuglia very successfully refutes, mostly not by assertion but instead by the brilliance of Ferrante's writing on her own works, her themes, her influences, even unpublished sections from some of her works that explain her thought processes.
But she does admit to using tools to hook the reader while at the same time refusing the bounds of genre fiction:
I publish to be read. It’s the only thing that interests me about publication. So I employ all the strategies I know to capture the reader’s attention, stimulate curiosity, make the page as dense as possible and as easy as possible to turn.
But once I have the reader’s attention I feel it is my right to pull it in whichever direction I choose. I don’t think the reader should be indulged as a consumer, because he isn’t one. Literature that indulges the tastes of the reader is a degraded literature. My goal is to disappoint the usual expectations and inspire new ones.
And as a final point that struck me, she both neatly skewers the type of political writing that, e.g. won the 2016 Booker Prize:
"But what of any real political effect? In general it seems to me disappointing: a rhetorically complicit nudge given to a public that is already convinced."
and, through her comments on Silvio Berlusconi in 2002, anticipates the events of 2016:
"The construction of his figure as a democratically elected economic-political-television Duce will remain a perfectible, repeatable model...(He has) practically demonstrated that the interests off an individual can be installed overnight, thanks to a business group (not a political party), on top of the political dissatisfaction of half of Italy, higher classes and lower classes, passed off as a heroic story of national salvation and, above all, without extinguishing democratic assurances."
(Albeit in 2002 she attributes this to people suspending credulity and treating everything they are told as true, whereas to me 2016 is the pay-truth age where no one believes anything and so a lie or an unsubstantiated assertion is as valid as the truth or an expert opinion. )
Overall a wonderful "slightly dense afterword" to Ferrante's impressive novels, but best read if one is already familiar with them to get the most from it.
barel63's review against another edition
5.0
Strap in people, this is going to be a long ride and a long word vomit. But it’s a long weekend and I’m sleep deprived so screw it. Here it finally comes. This contains absolutely nothing of substance as a review. Nothing. It’s just me raving for 1000+ words.
So since this is a Ferrante book it is obviously going to be five stars because, well, it’s great and also Ferrante could write the proverbial manual or grocery list and I would still rate it five stars because I really just want to that’s how much I love her writing. I make up for my laissez-faire rating attitude towards her books by being stingy as hell with the rest of my ratings so it all balances out in the end.
This is no the first time I am reading this book. I read the original (shorter) version last year and obviously loved it. And although I bought this the moment I learned of its existence (still remember the day, September last year, I was in a bus, it had just crossed the bridge to my side of the Seine and we were stopping by the Musée d’Orsay), I left it unread for almost a year. I guess I subconsciously did not want to be done with Ferrante just yet.
This edition contains the original essays and interviews, with the addition of more interviews that came after the publication of the Neapolitan Quartet (as they are know in the English-speaking world).
I found the additions after the publication of “My Brilliant Friend” particularly liberating. After journalists spent ten years annoying the crap out of Ferrante by asking her about her anonymity (and getting some hilariously nasty emails in response without having a chance to write back), by the time she published My Brilliant Friend most journalists knew better than to hammer on to that topic. Rather, a lot of the questions in the past five years have been a lot more exciting: talking about feminism, the writers that inspire her, what does it mean to be a female writer in a man’s world and so on and so forth.
And I’ve got to say that now that I have read her answers to these questions about womanhood and what writers try to capture about the human experience I have come to agree with Ferrante almost entirely: readers have truly little use for the author’s output. Turns out if you spend your life agonizing over a particular book(s) (as I have with all of Ferrante’s works in the past 18 months, because clearly I have no chill and I refuse to even be apologetic about this, but I digress) you find in the books the presence of the author itself, the way the author thinks. You don’t need to know their biography or anything about their schooling. The story is there. As Edna St. Vincent Millay used to say:
““This book, when I am dead, will be
A little faint perfume of me.
People who knew me well will say,
She really used to think that way.”
I did feel quite vindicated to have that the marginalia in copies of Ferrante’s books match her thought process in creating her characters. It’s all about real life truth, not artistic truth. Turns out what she likes to do is prove that you can know yourself, but not control it. And in fact, it’s not true that you can ever know yourself because part of who you are is always concealed in how others see you and that’s not something you can truly know. I love these super meta literary exercises and the fact that so does Ferrante makes me very happy. The woman spends paragraphs describing to journalists why she likes certain idioms and how literal they feel for God’s sake!
Overall, I do have a very soft spot for the essay this collection derives its name from, a piece of writing in which Ferrante responds to four questions by two journalists with a dissertation of about 100 pages. These answers about womanhood, Naples, and the influence of Greek literature to her studies and her life have made think very seriously about the possibly that at this point Ferrante was already thinking and writing portions of My Brilliant Friend. In fact, “La Frantumaglia” as an essay might as well be an exercise of Ferrante creating and living in the character of Lenu, slowly building herself up to the novels.
A lot of what Ferrante says about her writing process makes a lot of sense for me in retrospect: you can feel her figuring out the story as she is writing it. I think (perhaps mistakenly, I don’t know) that you can tell when a writer spends a hella lot of time figuring the story out, building it scene by scene. It tends to feel like a play, it loses a bit of the truth that should come from fiction, it loses a bit of life. Yes, books that are overthought tend to look like plays with very poor stage directions.
And that’s the beauty of Ferrante’s writing: you can tell she worked hard on this, but you can also feel that she did not hold her characters in a tight artistic grip. To use her own words, she did not try to domesticate the story or her characters.
And when it comes to style, Ferrante says various times that she prefers the story to be true to the writing being beautiful. There are those out there that might agree with the idea that Ferrante’s writing is not… well, about her writing (I even found this one article where the woman argued that the English version was better, but that’s a topic for another time). But I would have to disagree. There are things she brings to the surface about human existence that do not need a colorful prose. But the pleasurable aesthetics of Ferrante’s writing often are found in the insignificant details, in the way her characters interact with their surroundings. I mean, look at the way she describes a particular childhood memory of her in Naples running to find shelter at home after a particularly bad storm had hit the city all of a sudden (the bad translation that follows is all mine):
“It is then that I became aware of the city for the first time. I felt it on my shoulders and underneath my feet, it ran away with us, gasping under its dirty breath…”
I mean, look at that! “I felt the city underneath my feet”. I think about that phrase and a lot of other phrases that she has written that hold perhaps no particular moral value. It’s just the way of being aware of things and her surroundings. This is how she managed to make us all feel like we live in Naples without really describing it. Without needing to go through the Balzacian effort of capturing every shadow or light or flower on the doorstep. I just can’t. I have no words.
I have so many thoughts about Ferrante’s works. I have another file on my desktop that runs to about 4000 words of disjointed stream-of-consciousness fragments deriving from the way Ferrante’s writings makes me feel and think. So I am going to try to wrap this up before I digress into insomnia for the night.
“La Frantumaglia” explains not only Ferrante’s journey, it helps explain to me what I love so much about her. At first, I thought it was her ability to write female characters and relationships that I knew well and had brought to the surface feelings we never dare avow. I also thought it might be because I recognized in Lena’s and Lila’s Neapolitan childhood and their struggle to climb up the social ladder a little bit of my struggle (Knausgaard(TM)) But I think that what connects me to her so deeply is no the socio-economic or literary value of her work: I think is that raw (and nerdy) passion she has for language and words, and books and how much it all means without necessarily being everything.
Okay, Barbara out.
So since this is a Ferrante book it is obviously going to be five stars because, well, it’s great and also Ferrante could write the proverbial manual or grocery list and I would still rate it five stars because I really just want to that’s how much I love her writing. I make up for my laissez-faire rating attitude towards her books by being stingy as hell with the rest of my ratings so it all balances out in the end.
This is no the first time I am reading this book. I read the original (shorter) version last year and obviously loved it. And although I bought this the moment I learned of its existence (still remember the day, September last year, I was in a bus, it had just crossed the bridge to my side of the Seine and we were stopping by the Musée d’Orsay), I left it unread for almost a year. I guess I subconsciously did not want to be done with Ferrante just yet.
This edition contains the original essays and interviews, with the addition of more interviews that came after the publication of the Neapolitan Quartet (as they are know in the English-speaking world).
I found the additions after the publication of “My Brilliant Friend” particularly liberating. After journalists spent ten years annoying the crap out of Ferrante by asking her about her anonymity (and getting some hilariously nasty emails in response without having a chance to write back), by the time she published My Brilliant Friend most journalists knew better than to hammer on to that topic. Rather, a lot of the questions in the past five years have been a lot more exciting: talking about feminism, the writers that inspire her, what does it mean to be a female writer in a man’s world and so on and so forth.
And I’ve got to say that now that I have read her answers to these questions about womanhood and what writers try to capture about the human experience I have come to agree with Ferrante almost entirely: readers have truly little use for the author’s output. Turns out if you spend your life agonizing over a particular book(s) (as I have with all of Ferrante’s works in the past 18 months, because clearly I have no chill and I refuse to even be apologetic about this, but I digress) you find in the books the presence of the author itself, the way the author thinks. You don’t need to know their biography or anything about their schooling. The story is there. As Edna St. Vincent Millay used to say:
““This book, when I am dead, will be
A little faint perfume of me.
People who knew me well will say,
She really used to think that way.”
I did feel quite vindicated to have that the marginalia in copies of Ferrante’s books match her thought process in creating her characters. It’s all about real life truth, not artistic truth. Turns out what she likes to do is prove that you can know yourself, but not control it. And in fact, it’s not true that you can ever know yourself because part of who you are is always concealed in how others see you and that’s not something you can truly know. I love these super meta literary exercises and the fact that so does Ferrante makes me very happy. The woman spends paragraphs describing to journalists why she likes certain idioms and how literal they feel for God’s sake!
Overall, I do have a very soft spot for the essay this collection derives its name from, a piece of writing in which Ferrante responds to four questions by two journalists with a dissertation of about 100 pages. These answers about womanhood, Naples, and the influence of Greek literature to her studies and her life have made think very seriously about the possibly that at this point Ferrante was already thinking and writing portions of My Brilliant Friend. In fact, “La Frantumaglia” as an essay might as well be an exercise of Ferrante creating and living in the character of Lenu, slowly building herself up to the novels.
A lot of what Ferrante says about her writing process makes a lot of sense for me in retrospect: you can feel her figuring out the story as she is writing it. I think (perhaps mistakenly, I don’t know) that you can tell when a writer spends a hella lot of time figuring the story out, building it scene by scene. It tends to feel like a play, it loses a bit of the truth that should come from fiction, it loses a bit of life. Yes, books that are overthought tend to look like plays with very poor stage directions.
And that’s the beauty of Ferrante’s writing: you can tell she worked hard on this, but you can also feel that she did not hold her characters in a tight artistic grip. To use her own words, she did not try to domesticate the story or her characters.
And when it comes to style, Ferrante says various times that she prefers the story to be true to the writing being beautiful. There are those out there that might agree with the idea that Ferrante’s writing is not… well, about her writing (I even found this one article where the woman argued that the English version was better, but that’s a topic for another time). But I would have to disagree. There are things she brings to the surface about human existence that do not need a colorful prose. But the pleasurable aesthetics of Ferrante’s writing often are found in the insignificant details, in the way her characters interact with their surroundings. I mean, look at the way she describes a particular childhood memory of her in Naples running to find shelter at home after a particularly bad storm had hit the city all of a sudden (the bad translation that follows is all mine):
“It is then that I became aware of the city for the first time. I felt it on my shoulders and underneath my feet, it ran away with us, gasping under its dirty breath…”
I mean, look at that! “I felt the city underneath my feet”. I think about that phrase and a lot of other phrases that she has written that hold perhaps no particular moral value. It’s just the way of being aware of things and her surroundings. This is how she managed to make us all feel like we live in Naples without really describing it. Without needing to go through the Balzacian effort of capturing every shadow or light or flower on the doorstep. I just can’t. I have no words.
I have so many thoughts about Ferrante’s works. I have another file on my desktop that runs to about 4000 words of disjointed stream-of-consciousness fragments deriving from the way Ferrante’s writings makes me feel and think. So I am going to try to wrap this up before I digress into insomnia for the night.
“La Frantumaglia” explains not only Ferrante’s journey, it helps explain to me what I love so much about her. At first, I thought it was her ability to write female characters and relationships that I knew well and had brought to the surface feelings we never dare avow. I also thought it might be because I recognized in Lena’s and Lila’s Neapolitan childhood and their struggle to climb up the social ladder a little bit of my struggle (Knausgaard(TM)) But I think that what connects me to her so deeply is no the socio-economic or literary value of her work: I think is that raw (and nerdy) passion she has for language and words, and books and how much it all means without necessarily being everything.
Okay, Barbara out.
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