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A review by barel63
La frantumaglia by Elena Ferrante
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.