In the Margins

Starred review from January 3, 2022
Four essays illuminate the mind of Ferrante (The Lying Life of Adults) in this dazzling collection. In “Pain and Pen” she recalls writing “neat” and “orderly” stories in elementary school notebooks, and explains that the “discordant clamor” in her head led to her novels of “love and betrayal, dangerous investigations, horrific discoveries, corrupted youth, miserable lives that have a stroke of luck.” “Aquamarine” explores the “passion for realism” that she’s “stubbornly pursued since adolescence,” and recounts the “small discoveries” she found after drafting a cover letter for an “unsatisfying” novel she wrote. “Histories, I” sheds light on the particularly “arduous journey” shared by women writers, and acknowledges how the craft of writing builds on the work of those who came before—Ferrante counts among her influences Ingeborg Bachmann, Emily Dickinson, María Guerra, and Gertrude Stein. In “Dante’s Rib,” Ferrante responds to Dante’s work: “I loved and love Dante’s words but am exhausted by their force.” The collection’s strength comes from Ferrante’s beautiful prose, as well as the fascinating look at where she finds inspiration. The author’s legions of fans are in for a treat.

March 1, 2022
Ferrante (The Lying Life of Adults, 2020) wrote the first three essays in this collection for the public Umberto Eco guest lecture series at the University of Bologna. Postponed a year due to the pandemic, they were finally performed by an Italian actress (the famously private Ferrante writes under a pseudonym) and televised in November 2021. In these wise and vigorous pieces examining Ferrante's lifetime spent reading and writing--and what it has meant to do these things as a woman--Ferrante ("the author--a fiction forever incomplete") calls on the works of Woolf, Stein, Dickinson, and others, while unself-consciously sharing her experiences capturing and releasing "the discordant clamor in [her] head." There are gems aplenty here, on writing in general and about Ferrante's specifically; that things come together for her only once they fall apart, breaking free of genre and convention, and the "necessary other" at the heart of her widely ready Neapolitan Novels. A fourth essay considers Dante's Beatrice. This slim but formidable book requires a special sort of Ferrante fan, but there are plenty of those.

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January 1, 2022
Essays on fiction, reality, and identity from an elusive novelist. In 2020, Ferrante had written three lectures to present, but the pandemic lockdown led to the cancellation of public events. As Europa president Sandra Ozzola writes in the introduction, "in November 2021 the actress Manuela Mandracchia, in the guise of Elena Ferrante, presented the lectures." Separately, another Ferrante essay "was read by the scholar and critic Tiziana de Rogatis." All four offer candid reflections on Ferrante's development as a writer. Growing up in what she calls a "literary patrimony," she at first tried to imitate men's works. Gradually, she realized that, as a woman, her challenge was "to learn to use with freedom the cage we're shut up in." Among the many writers who have shaped her work, Ferrante cites Virginia Woolf, who inspired her to think about her authorial self as a plurality, and Gertrude Stein, whose book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas deftly subverted the autobiographical genre. Ferrante discloses the "passion for real things" that informed her early efforts: "I modeled characters on people I'd known or knew. I noted gestures, ways of speaking, as I saw and heard them. I described landscapes, and the way the light passed over them. I reproduced social dynamics, settings that were economically and culturally far apart. Despite my uneasiness, I let dialect have its space." But she came to recognize that creating a sense of reality "was a game of illusion," and fiction is indelibly etched with an author's identity. "I can recount 'out there' only if I also recount the me who is 'out there' along with all the rest," she writes. Ferrante offers insights about her complex protagonists, including Lila and Lenu, in her Neapolitan novels, and the first-person narrator of her most recent novel, The Lying Life of Adults, which she conceived as a story "in which you don't know who the woman-character writing is." Enticing glimpses into a writer's life. Let's hope for a full-length memoir one day.

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Starred review from March 11, 2022

Around 2020, Ferrante (Neapolitan Quartet) was invited by the University of Bologna to give three lectures, discussing her work as a writer, her poetics, her narrative technique, "or anything else she wants [that] would be of interest to a broad, non-specialist audience." Because of Ferrante's insistence on anonymity--and the pandemic--the lectures were read by an actress. Her first essay, "Pain and Pen," explores her desire to write (she was a voracious, sophisticated reader as a child and young adult, admiring the works of Italo Svevo, Gaspara Stampa, and Zeno, among many others) and her passion for writing, along with the two kinds of writing she feels she knows best, compliant and impetuous. "Aquamarine" begins with a quote from Denis Diderot that Ferrante adopted as a piece of advice on writing: "Tell the thing as it is." Her third essay, "History, I," begins with an intensive analysis of a poem by Emily Dickinson, "Witchcraft was hung, in History." Finally, she adds a fourth essay, "Dante's Rib," a deep and compelling piece composed for the Association of Italianists that concluded its 2021 conference, "Dante and Other Classics." VERDICT These brilliant essays not only provide insights into other great writers and their work but into Ferrante's own work as well, and will be appreciated by her many followers as well as scholars and general readers.--Marcia Welsh

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