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Brunch in NYC solo with the company of these books

By Melissa Kravitz   Special to amNewYork

It happened again: Your squad slept through brunch. Or worse, you couldn’t get a table for the crew but somehow squeezed yourself into a lonely bar seat to wallow in eggs Benedict alone. It’s all good, because you brought the company of some great nonfiction that’s much more entertaining than any mimosa-fueled conversation at this way too loud trendy brunch spot. Here’s what you’ll want to read while brunching solo.

‘Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey’ by Elena Ferrante

This new nonfiction account by the author known as Ferrante lets you get intimate with the person behind the pseudonym — you’ll forget you weren’t actually brunching with Ferrante herself. Decades of letters, personal writing, interviews and more are collected in this new look into Ferrante’s mysterious life and writing process.

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In Frantumaglia, Elena Ferrante Is Her Own Greatest Work of Fiction 

Early in Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey, Elena Ferrante acknowledges that she is going to lie. Even though Frantumaglia, a collection of letters, interviews, and other ephemera, is ostensibly non-fiction, it’s a label that seems too flexible, if not entirely meaningless. Ferrante is an unreliable narrator herself but she wouldn’t be the first woman, fictional or otherwise, who was purposefully untrustworthy.

The book’s title, Ferrante writes, is a word borrowed from her mother, a woman Ferrante describes as a talented dressmaker in Naples who spoke in dialect. “[My mother] said she that inside her she had a frantumaglia, a jumble of fragments. The frantumaglia depressed her,” she writes. In her mother’s hands, frantumaglia is both the haunting of history, of fragments of the self that continuously rattle, as well as the source of sadness. In some respect, it is a tabula rasa for womanhood. For Ferrante, the concept of frantumaglia is even more volatile:

The frantumaglia is an unstable landscape, an infinite aerial or aquatic mass of debris that appears to the I, brutally, as its true and unique inner self. The frantumaglia is the store house of time without the orderliness of history, a story.

The passage could be a manifesto for her novels: the search for the authentic self beneath the rubble of history and womanhood; the subsequent, catastrophic realization that the self is “fated to vanish” into the spectacle of the crowd. It’s a sophisticated passage, steeped in post-modern theories that Ferrante draws from with an elegant ease. And, because it’s Ferrante, the passage is beautifully executed, both evocative and vivid. In short, it’s a perfect Ferrante passage—everything a dedicated reader could possibly want from the writer of the Neapolitan Quartet is here.

And yet, Ferrante’s mother—the woman described in interviews and reproduced here in a loving passage about dressmaking and clothing—is fiction. We know now, after an investigation by the Italian journalist Claudio Gatti, that Elena Ferrante is likely Anita Raja, a translator whose mother fled Germany during the Holocaust. Raja’s mother was not a dressmaker, nor did she speak in Neapolitan dialect. How much of the passage is true—how much of Raja’s own biography is accurately presented throughout Frantumaglia—is unclear.

In these fragments, it’s impossible to tell where the fiction Ferrante ends and the real Raja begins. I’m not certain that the delineation matters. It doesn’t seem to matter who Ferrante actually is; it’s enough to know that she’s beautiful fiction. “The word is always flesh,” Ferrante writes to an interviewer, a winking notation that collapses the space between the women who populate her novels and the author herself.

Ferrante was always present in her novels, as she is here, in narrative fragments, in small pieces. It’s a point she returns to again and again in the interview transcripts included in Frantumaglia. In nearly every interview Ferrante is asked about her identity and subsequently asked how much of her books are autobiographical. In nearly every interview, Ferrante responds by saying that her novels are fiction and she draws from only her personal knowledge of human emotions, particularly their gendered expression. It was an answer that didn’t seem to assuage critics who either simply couldn’t believe that Lenu and Lila were pure creations or who simply wanted more and more of Ferrante’s story.

And yet Ferrante resisted those questions, dismissed them as part of an increasing spectacle that treats authorship as an end goal, rather than the novel itself. “The biographical path does not lead to the genius of a work; it’s only a micro-story on the side,” Ferrante writes. It’s perhaps why the hunt for her identity felt wrong. What would knowing about Anita Raja tell us about Elena Ferrante? Perhaps it could be a confirmation that Ferrante, long rumored to be a man or multiple people, wasn’t all that creative. Ferrante balks at both suggestions, she doesn’t believe that the author is “inessential” just inconsequential to good writing.

Perhaps also, as Ferrante suggests, the clamor for the celebrity author would finally be met, newspapers would be sold, traffic goals would be met, and culture writers could have more than just a good book, they could have a star. But when Ferrante was identified as Raja, readers resisted the identification. Such mundane knowledge seemed designed to ruin the magic of Ferrante, reduce her authoritative representation of gender to its dull realities. The person created by Ferrante—that new autobiography that quite clearly engaged in the magic of her novels—satisfies the reader’s craving of her otherworldliness. In Frantumaglia, you won’t find Ferrante as a real person who, like everyone, is a succession of boring details, of chores and schedules and financial obligations. Ferrante may grapple with the significance of relationships between mothers and daughters, or female friends, she isn’t interested in their minutiae, she is interested in piecing together the fragments.

So here is Ferrante in written fragments: she cranky and difficult, in her own words, she’s “neurotic.” She’s anxious and protective; warm and kind; a woman is who simultaneously politically engaged and an aesthete. She is also an intellectual, she freely cites Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, and the classics. She weaves them into letters personally and effortlessly and is grounded in the literature of university humanities departments. But her intellect isn’t cold, her application of theory isn’t done objectively—the women that populate her novels are not merely flat, fictional objects to Ferrante, rather they’re real and visceral (“the word is always flesh”).

In various letters, Ferrante writes about her characters as if they are flesh and blood women; she has real concerns about how the choices that she makes affect them (there are a number of deleted passages in the book, particularly from Days of Abandonment). The letters, taken together, make plain that Ferrante also knows the contours of these women, the shape of the feelings and their limitations. Olga, Lenu, and Lila seem as real in Frantumaglia as they do in their novels, largely because they are real to Ferrante.

Rendering real women, with their fraught relationships and anger, joy, anxieties, disappointment and sadness, has always been where Ferrante is at her most authentic; where she is her most truthful. But in Frantmuaglia, her first work of non-fiction, the reader finds one of Ferrante’s most convincing works of fiction: Elena Ferrante.

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BAFFLING OMISSIONS FROM THE NY TIMES’ 100 NOTABLE BOOKS LIST

SERIOUSLY, GUYS, YOU LEFT OFF A NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER

November 29, 2016  By Emily Temple

Just before Thanksgiving, The New York Times Book Review published its list of the 100 Notable Books of 2016. This happens every year, of course, and usually, the choices aren’t particularly surprising. After all, 100 is a lot, and so the list is basically a series of nods. Nod nod nod. No real fanfare until the list of 10 comes out. But I have to say that this year’s list is a little perplexing—which is not to say it’s all bad. It’s lovely, for instance, to see great books from smaller presses—like Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing With Feathersand Melanie Finn’s The Gloaming—on there. But there are quite a few surprising exclusions—a few great books that somehow didn’t make the cut, and a few that were hyped so much that it just feels a little weird to see a list without them.

This all leads me to ask the obvious question: what does “notable” mean? The Book Review gives no hint. The scant information on the Notable Books page suggests that all books reviewed since December 6, 2015—which probably means that only books actually covered in the Book Review as opposed to the books section of the Times (but I’ll just roll my complaints about that into this other complaint)—are eligible, but past that it seems to be a matter of opinion and wizardry. Of course, I’ve nothing against opinion and wizardry; it’s how I live. But still—I have questions. A few notable exclusions from the list follow.

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Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia

Turns out Ferrante can do wrong—but even if this book is no good, surely the avid and far-reaching conversation it inadvertently sparked in the literary world renders it notable?

Bogotá sin Edición

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“I fervently hope Elena Ferrante will not stop writing”: Judith Thurman

 Foto: premioggm.org

By Laura Quiceno

Judith Thurman has written on Yves Saint Laurent and Proust; on Colette, the French authoress who broke away from every mold of her time; on Vera, wife of Vladimir Nabokov; on designer Isabel Toledo; on Marina Abramovich; on “Lost Women”, forgotten by history and by media. She has read the work of hundreds of women who wrote in other languages, in other centuries and have submerged in the voices of women and their trades.

“I started my career in journalism at Ms. Magazine, in the 1970s. It was the first feminist magazine. I wrote about “Lost Women”–mostly foreign language European writers who were not well known to American audiences. I found a niche, in other words. I think that is something young writers still have to do”

Since she started writing in her own column in The New Yorker and in each and every one of her books, she has explored fashion, the underlying codes of clothing, and beauty. For this admirer of the work of Walter Benjamin, Emily Dickinson, and Elena Ferrante, us women have a unique to see the world.

“Women have a distinctive perspective and voice. In this respect, I would refer you to the writings of Ferrante, on the subject. She has a lot to say in her newly published collection of essays and interviews, Frantumaglia. That is what most of the text is concerned with. But the minute a woman’s voice is raised, the minute she becomes combative, she is likely to be put down. See all the commentary on Hillary Clinton’s “shrillness.”

Judith was at the Gabo Festival in Medellin, and after sharing for four hours with journalists of all Ibero-America, I asked for her email to send her some question about Elena Ferrante, authoress she talked about for a couple of minutes, about being a women in this field, and about the media coverage of this past election in the United States.

 Foto: premioggm.org

¿How did you land in journalism?

I started my career in journalism at Ms. Magazine, in the 1970s. It was the first feminist magazine. I wrote about “Lost Women”–mostly foreign language European writers who were not well known to American audiences. I found a niche, in other words. I think that is something young writers still have to do.

¿How hard was it for a woman to be a journalist back in those days?

Women a little older than I am, Nora Ephron, for example, have written about the way they were ghettoized at national magazines in the 1950s and 1960s,–consigned to “women’s” stories, rather than hard news, or even expected to make coffee. Newsrooms are still rather macho, and while things have vastly improved, there is still inequality. The New Yorker has also been criticized for not featuring enough women writers. That is beginning to change as the millenial generation overtakes the baby boomers. Women war reporters existed, but they were a rarity. There are more of them today. The women of my generation gravitated to cultural reporting, or to the reporting of women’s issues. This is changing, too.

¿Do you break with the traditions and roles undertaken by the women in your household and family?

 

My mother was a Latin teacher, but she was forced to quit when she got married! In those days (the 1930s and 1940s), at least in Boston, teaching jobs were reserved for male breadwinners, or for single women who were  helping to support their parents. But even though she became a stay-at-home mother,  she always encouraged my writing. I didn’t have or feel any pressure from my family to get married and fade into the obscurity of domestic life.

¿Do you think us women have a distinctive perspective, our own voice?

Yes, I think women have a distinctive perspective and voice. In this respect, I would refer you to the writings of Ferrante, on the subject. She has a lot to say in her newly published collection of essays and interviews, Frantumaglia. That is what most of the text is concerned with. But the minute a woman’s voice is raised, the minute she becomes combative, she is likely to be put down. See all the commentary on Hillary Clinton’s “shrillness.”

¿Since when have you been immersed into discussions surrounding women and their trades?

I have spent most of my career thinking and writing about the female experience, and the forces that shape it.

¿Why is it important to reconcile with the legacy or the life path chosen by our mothers andgrandmothers?

The feminists of my generation were reluctant to engage with their ambivalence towards their mothers. They focused their rage on the “patriarchy.” Ferrante, again, is very interesting, even radical, on the subject of the mother/daughter bond, and the “hostile love” it engenders, which for her is a source of vitality. This is a very fertile field. I think women have been held back, in part, by the fear of outstripping their mothers; and also by the difficulties of separation, which can be experienced as a betrayal.

¿How did the idea of writing the essay “Swann Song” come up? How would you relate the work of Yves Saint Laurent with that of Proust?

The reportage on Saint Laurent was assigned, but I welcomed the opportunity. It took about six weeks. Saint Laurent was deeply inspired by Proust, and the world of gay estheticism of the fin de siecle, but it’s difficult to compare the work of a couturier to the work of a great novelist. That said, they were both supremely talented, supremely neurasthenic French artists steeped in the world of the haute bourgeoisie, and fascinated by its codes.

During the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Festival, you talked about author Elena Ferrante and how, regardless of her pseudonym, you knew those stories had been written by a woman. ¿What is the strength of a writer such as Ferrante?

Ferrante has a radical new woman’s voice–we haven’t heard it before. It’s fierce, it’s fearless, it’s visceral, yet it’s also deeply intellectual. It’s steeped in mythology, yet also in daily life. It seems to come from a place like the womb itself: bloody, viscous, nurturing, terrifying.

 

¿What is your opinión on the research conducted by journalist Claudio Gatti to discover Ferrante’s identity?

I think Gatti committed a violation that is rather like rape. He penetrated the private and vulnerable space of a woman against her express will, and stole something precious: her anonymity. He set out to break something and perhaps he did. I fervently hope she will not stop writing.

Why did it raised so much controversy and why was it described as sexist? ¿What does the current race for the White House have to say about the media?

I can’t answer question 13 simply. The media have, to some degree, created, or colluded in the creation, of the Trump monster. On the other hand, how could they not cover his rise? The Trump camp constantly rails at media bias, and yet the media also have the obligation to ferret out the truth behind his lies (or Hillary’s, for that matter), and they have done that, although the reporting of Trump’s atrocious views and actions has not managed, as it should have, as it would have in the case of any other candidate, disqualified him in the eyes of millions of voters.

¿What are the stories that, according to you, are missing from the literature made by women?

A new generation will have new stories to tell. Stories that touch on the evolution of our fixed ideas about gender and sexuality, motherhood, solitude, and autonomy.

The New Inquiry

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Call Me Elena

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elena-social

Elena Ferrante’s Frantumaglia has been marketed as non-fiction. Does it matter if it isn’t?

ON October 2, the New York Review of Books published an article by the Italian journalist Claudio Gatti titled “Elena Ferrante: An Answer?” Gatti’s revelations were co-published by the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore (which commissioned Gatti’s investigation), the German newspaper Frankurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and the French website Mediapart. The question to which Gatti was offering a possible answer was that of Ferrante’s “real-world” identity.

The fantastic success of the Neapolitan Quartet–Ferrante sold 2.6 million books in the English-language market–transformed the author’s decision to publish pseudonymously from a journalistic irritant (Ferrante’s refusal to be interviewed in person made it impossible for critics to write a traditional profile) to a demurral that international notoriety made necessary. By writing under a pseudonym “I have gained,” Ferrante told Vanity Fair after the final installment of the quartet was published, “a space of my own, a space that is free, where I feel active and present. To relinquish it would be very painful.”

Gatti appears to have understood Ferrante’s decision as a deliberate provocation. The timing of his “unveiling” seemed particularly directed at the publication of Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey, a collection of Ferrante’s non-fiction, which now appears in English for the first time. His description of Frantumaglia is pointedly ungenerous–“a volume purporting in part to outline her family background”–and his prelude to the big reveal is a snide flourish: the woman behind Ferrante isn’t “the daughter of Neopolitan seamstress described in Frantumaglia,” he crows, she is “a Rome-based translator whose German-born mother fled the Holocaust and later married a Neopolitan magistrate.”

Writing for The Week, the critic Lili Loofbourow explainsFerrante’s claim that her mother was a dressmaker as a parable. “It is Ferrante-the-writer’s genesis story… It may not have been literally true, but it arguably explains quite a bit more about Ferrante’s intellectual formation than whatever her mother’s real job was.” Loofbourow’s analysis argues for the pleasure of reading Ferrante’s words through a broad thematic, rather than a specifically personal lens. Frantumaglia has been marketed as non-fiction, but perhaps it isn’t. It might be better described as criticism by an author who just happens to go by the same name as the writer whose works she is exploring.
IF Elena Ferrante’s novels–seven since 1992–can be said to be governed by a central metaphor, it is that of a woman falling apart. The phenomenon is best named in Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the third novel in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. “From her unstuck head,” the novel’s narrator, Elena, writes of her friend Lila, “figures and voices of the day were emerging, floating through the room… Her heartbeats were now so powerful that they seemed capable of exploding the interlocking solidity of objects.” I would call this a panic attack. Lila calls it “dissolving boundaries.”

For Ferrante’s women, the lines between the body and the city, between personal and familial identity, between a friend’s mind and one’s own, are forever on the verge of collapse. Ferrante is particularly interested in tracking the moment of dissolution: how, where, and what is felt when a woman temporarily crosses from sanity into madness. In her first novel, Troubling Love, the narrator hallucinates her mother, whom she has just buried, in a funicular station. In The Days of Abandonment, Ferrante’s second novel, written a decade after her first, Olga, whose husband has just left her, finds she is suddenly unable to open her own front door. In The Lost Daughter, her third, a middle-aged professor vacationing at the beach steals a child’s doll and cannot bring herself to return it.

“Every interior state,” Ferrante told the Turkish journalist Yasemin Çongar in 2015, “is, ultimately, a magma that clashes with self-control, and it’s that magma we have to try to describe if we want the pages to have energy.” Ferrante’s female protagonists resist the magma. They prefer to hold the world at bay and their emotions in check; their memories of childhood are populated by neighborhood wives who, abandoned by their husbands, went crazy. Menaced by the specter of these feral women, Ferrante’s heroines labor to construct chilly, respectable personas. This makes their eventual loss of self-control all the more painful, for it is a loss not only of control but of self. And it is always a question of when, not if, the world will rush in and emotions will pour out. A breach is, in Ferrante’s novels, always inevitable.

So perhaps it was also inevitable, though not remotely fair, that the private barrier Ferrante resolutely constructed between herself and the world by publishing under a pseudonym would crumble. Perhaps, too, it was predictable that what would emerge was a personal history more complicated than the one Ferrante had been disclosing.
FRANTUMAGLIA is appropriately a disjointed text. (Ferrante defines “frantumaglia” as “a jumble of fragments”). It is a gathering of interviews, essays, and letters (some unsent) written to her publishers, to journalists, and to the directors who adapted her first two novels for the screen. (An earlier version of the volume was published in Italy in 2003; the Vanity Fair interview and the dialogue with Çongar quoted above are both reprinted within.) What does not vary is Ferrante’s tone, which will be familiar to readers of her fiction; she speaks, or rather writes (the interviews were, with one exception, conducted in writing), coolly. (Part of the appeal of Ferrante’s novels is that while the themes may be emotional, her prose never is. It is thanks to–and not in spite of–the calm precision of her descriptions that the reader feels plunged into the turbulent states on the page, states which suddenly seem comprehensible, even logical.)

This is true especially of Ferrante’s answers about what has been, unfairly but not unexpectedly, the most heated topic of all: her decision to use a penname. Almost every interview collected in Frantumaglia includes a question about Ferrante’s choice to remain anonymous. One side effect of this fact is that throughout Frantumaglia, Ferrante frequently seems to be arguing against the collection’s very existence. “I consider the text a self-sufficient body, which has in itself, in its makeup, all the questions and all the answers,” she told a Danish newspaper in 2003. “For those who love reading,” she told the Italian journalist Francesco Erbani three years later, “the author is purely a name.” “I think authors should be sought in the books they put their names to,” she explained to the Financial Times last year, “not in the physical person who is writing or in his or her private life.”

Although neither the question nor the essential answer has changed, Frantumaglia shows how Ferrante’s reasons for anonymity have evolved over the years. As she explains in an interview first published in the Spring 2015 issue of the Paris Review, she was originally “frightened by the possibility of having to come out of my shell… Later, it was hostility toward the media… It’s not the book that counts, but the aura of the author.” What Ferrante does not say but must be aware of is that the author known as “Elena Ferrante” has of course accrued such an aura over the course of her career. Frantumaglia itself could not have been published otherwise.

Consider this: In the mid 1900s, the Italian journalist Francesco Erbani wrote to Ferrante to ask if she would be interested in an interview that would have been pegged to the release of a film based on her first, and at the time only novel, Troubling Love. In an unsent reply included in the collection (the letter is undated, but an editorial note speculates that it was written in 1995), Ferrante wonders why Erbani, who in his original missive writes of his admiration for her novel, did not approach her for an interview until a film based on Troubling Love was underway. “Question,” she writes, “if my book had said nothing to you and my name had said something, would it have taken you less time to ask for an interview?” Erbani replied to the author after seeing the letter in the 2003 edition of Frantumaglia. In a note that follows Ferrante’s, he explains that he did not contact her when Troubling Love was first published because he was, at the time, working at the foreign news department of a press agency and so not in a position to interview her. The name “Ferrante” became known without the assistance of authorial self-promotion because her books indeed said something; but it is in part because the name “Ferrante” now says something that she has been, for years, so eagerly interviewed.

In keeping with her decision to remain pseudonymous, Ferrante does not, in Frantumaglia or elsewhere, provide readers with quotidian details–a description of her writing space, anecdotes about her children. She does, however, offer up bits of personal narrative, most frequently about her childhood. These are at odds with the biography of the woman behind Ferrante that Gatti presents. That woman grew up in Rome, the city to which her family moved when she was three; Ferrante writes of growing up in Naples. That woman has one younger brother; Ferrante writes of two younger sisters.

The other personal details Ferrante has revealed in the past fifteen or so years (her first published interview dates from 2002) have not been many, but they have rhymed with the biographies she’s constructed for her characters: Delia’s mother in Troubling Love is a seamstress; almost all of her novels are set in Naples, and when they are not–The Days of Abandonment takes place in Turin–her protagonists are often, like Olga, from the southern city. It is precisely because I agree that authors do not owe us information about their quote-unquote real lives that I find this disappointing. And it does not seem wholly accidental; the invitation is to read biographically. Provided Gatti has indeed identified the correct woman, these discrepancies imply that as firmly as Ferrante believed her books themselves were enough, she didn’t quite trust her readers would believe the same.

“Literary truth,” Ferrante says in the version of her Paris Review interview reprinted in Frantumaglia, “is the truth released exclusively by words used well, and it is realized entirely in the words that formulate it.” Ferrante’s novels, in their incisive descriptions of violent inner tumult, pulse with precisely this kind of truth. They never needed the support of matching biographical facts.
THE convenience of the autobiographical information Ferrante offers–the ease with which it allows readers to assume her novels are “authentic” because something in them is literally “true”–must be acknowledged. But the autobiographical information itself is a distraction, for Frantumaglia is, as Loofbourow suggests, far more interesting as a critical text than it is as a personally revelatory one.

In 1992, Troubling Love won a debut novel prize named after the Italian writer Elsa Morante. Ferrante did not attend the ceremony in person, but she penned an acceptance speech for her publishers to read. Riffing off a passage from Morante’s short story collection The Andalusian Shawl, Ferrante spoke of the figure of the “mother’s dressmaker” and the invisibility of maternal bodies. The mother’s dressmaker, Ferrante wrote, “cuts out clothes for the mother that eliminate the woman.” The ideal, in her view, would be for “the mother’s dressmaker” to construct clothes that would reveal rather than hide, that would “recover the woman’s body that the mother has… undress her [so that] her body, her age, would no longer be a mystery with no importance.” Recovering the mother’s body, her age, undressing her and therefore imbuing her with importance–this is as succinct an encapsulation of Ferrante’s novelistic project as any I’ve read. But it is also worth noting that the undressing Ferrante proposes is figurative. She wants the mother’s body clad in clothes that will reveal her; she does not want the mother to be entirely naked, undefended by artifice.

With the pseudonym destroyed, I worry that the author of the novels I love will retreat. For decades, Ferrante has written the magma. She has embraced messiness on the page. This embrace seems to have necessitated a counterbalancing neatness elsewhere, in the stories from Ferrante’s childhood that appear in Frantumaglia. While Ferrante’s novels speak complicated truths, the allegedly autobiographical narratives she provides from her childhood serve largely to confirm some readers’ simplistic hopes that those complicated truths are the fruit of fact rather than imagination. In an unsent letter written to Goffredo Fofi in 1995, Ferrante explained that “writing with the knowledge that I don’t have to appear produces a space of absolute creative freedom. It’s a corner of my own that I intend to defend, now that I’ve tried it. If I were deprived of it, I would feel absolutely impoverished.” Gatti’s investigations have given us a fuller, messier picture of the writer, but I fear this mess will be counterbalanced with a neatness elsewhere–that if Ferrante’s non-fiction has been made messy, her fiction will now, as a result, be made neat. And what could be neater than a blank page?

Where Is My Suitcase

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Naples, 1950s, and a friendship

This weekend I put down the “The Story of a New Name”, the second book of Elena Ferrante’s trilogy (apparently now tetralogy). That’s not a completely accurate statement – rather, the book put me down, allowed me to escape its pages, regurgitated me back to reality after a week of morning and evening commutes which I wished would last just a little longer, just until I reached the next chapter.

The Story of a New Name is a whirlwind of a novel, which may seem unusual, in that nothing particularly revolutionary happens in its pages. Two poor girls grow up in a crime-ridden, violent neighborhood of Naples in the 1905s, using their intelligence, street skills and friendship with each other to fight their way through a rough childhood and adolescence. And yet, the writing is so fierce, the plot lines weave in and out so tightly, the characters are so life-like yet mysterious that you cannot help but return often to this bleak and often unforgiving working class world that Ferrante describes so well.

The two main characters of the novels, Elena and Lila (Lina), forge a friendship that is unlikely and at times unlucky.

-Lina is a capricious figure, endowed with artistic intelligence and psychological insight that is too much for her to handle at her young age, especially when coupled with her fiery temper and seemingly contradictory emotions. Crippled in her hostile environment by skills that in another context would be gifts, she careens through her life seemingly blithely oblivious to her destructive, compelling force, intent on accomplishing goals that only she knows about. This force is what brings her environment -and indeed her friend Elena, the narrator – to oscillate between heedless devotion and uncomprehending animosity towards her. The reader too is pulled into this seesaw of emotions, as frustrated as her environment yet compelled to try to understand her, unable to leave her and return to peace.

Elena, the porter’s daughter, her best friend since childhood, seems to have her stars better aligned, with more support to her studies and ambition to better herself, to educate herself, to pull herself up and out of their neighborhood and its poverty. And yet, one feels as Elena self-deprecatingly puts it herself, that she is but a mere shadow of Lina’s personality, an incomplete reflection of the rollercoaster of her passionate friend.

The world the books describe is ugly, mostly chaotic, often violent. It is a world where nobody is surprised if a woman is beaten by her husband; he is only continuing the corrective work her brother and father have started. A mistress cast-away by an aspiring poet and father of many goes mad and is only fit to wash stairs. Children are not protected from violence or deprivation, teenage girls marry for the status it will convey, and the local mafia, sure of their impermeable status, walks the streets harassing young women. And yet the world of those Neapolitan streets is also vivacious, alive, smelly, ugly, and real. The naturalistic bent of Ferrante’s writing does not come across as preachy or vindictive – the language, at times vulgar, does not aim to shock. It simply seems to be an absorbing, fascinating account of two intertwined female lives. It will exhaust you and annoy you, but you will sail through until the last page and then heave a sigh of relief. And get yourself back to the library to check out volume three.

The News Today

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The Elena Ferrante I recognised

I came upon Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels quite late, when the translations of all four novels in the quartet had been published. I binge-read them. I drank them in like iced water on a hot day and, drinking too quickly, soon got a headache. Innumerable things big and small within the pages – incidents, images, single phrases – evoked that aching rush of feelings, a mix of “shaking my head” recognition, love and rage, which is how the best fiction works. Hadn’t one lived so much of this? The scruffy beloved dolls of childhood; the first experience of reading Little Women; the first time Lila writes a story. The fierce friendship of bold little girls in a world defined and controlled by men. As they grow up, their instinctive awareness of the need to strategise constantly, to camouflage their intelligence and reveal only flashes of it: “How difficult it was to find one’s way, how difficult it was not to violate any of the incredibly detailed male regulations.” On being a woman Ferrante’s epic saga contains everything about being a thinking, feeling, independent woman in the twentieth century: relationships, motherhood, the writing life, the life of work, sexual harassment, politics, sexism in the academy, the search for identity, choices. Disappointment, sometimes despair, but also compassion, solidarity and survival. Here, for instance, is the silent rage of the neighbourhood women: “As a child I imagined tiny, almost invisible animals that arrived in the neighbourhood at night, they came from the ponds, from the abandoned train cars beyond the embankment, from the stinking grasses called fetienti, from the frogs, the salamanders, the flies, the rocks, the dust, and entered the water and the food and the air, making our mothers, our grandmothers as angry as starving dogs.” And here is Lenu’s unforgettable description of Lila’s marriage: “The condition of wife had enclosed her in a sort of glass container, like a sailboat sailing with sails unfurled in an inaccessible place, without the sea.” Here is Lila’s resilience, her struggle to make and remake her identity even in the midst of brutal circumstances: designing shoes that other men will sell; designing a shop from which other men will profit; using black tape and paste to cut up her own photographic image in a brilliant act of disfigurement that symbolises not only her rage at being turned into an object, but also her unknowability, and the impossibility of reducing her to any one thing. And here is Lenu’s discipline, her intellectual growth, her struggle to escape the environment into which she had been born (“We had seen our fathers beat our mothers from childhood.”), to find her way through higher education, marriage, motherhood and writing, discovering her own narrative and herself as she retells the story of her friend’s wilful act of disappearance. In the novels, Lila and Lenu were both born in August 1944. I felt a small pang of emotion when I saw, in the index of The Story of a New Name, the mention of this detail. My mind took these fragments – a month, a year – and transported me to the Bombay neighbourhood of Matunga. My mother had been born in 1944. It was a time when India had not yet gained freedom from colonial rule. Growing up in that great commercial city, among immigrant families from the South, my mother was the first woman to graduate in her family. On the face of it, there is little to connect the lives of two fictional girls in a novel set in an impoverished, crime-ridden, deeply patriarchal neighbourhood in Naples with the life of my mother as I imagined her, a well-behaved little girl growing up in fifties’ India, in a comfortable middle-class family in Matunga, with braided hair, wearing a long pavadai, walking to the nearby South Indian Education Society school with her friends. Making connections But fiction makes unfathomable connections, and never in straight lines. I remember vividly an incident involving my mother and our neighbour’s child. We lived in Calcutta then, in a modern apartment building facing the lake. Our neighbours on the same floor were a family with two small children, a boy and a girl. Both fathers travelled constantly, leaving the mothers to raise the children. The women became close friends and the doors between the apartments remained open all day. One evening, our neighbours’ toddler cut her fingers while playing in their kitchen. As she screamed in pain, her mother was paralysed with fear. My mother ran in, with us behind her, saw what had happened, grabbed the child, called to my sister and me to come along, pushed all of us into the car – me, my sister, our neighbour, their little boy – and rushed us to the doctor. I asked my mother about that incident many years later. I had always known that she was capable and efficient, that she knew what to do in emergencies. People came to her for advice. But for a split second, before she whisked us into the car, my fear had been: what if she forgets to take us with her? My mother laughed: “How could I forget my children? I would sooner forget my eyes or my hands!” I thought of these words when I read about Lenu taking her little girls with her, one child holding her hand, a baby sleeping in a pram, as she attends demonstrations, lectures and events. Long descriptions of men arguing about politics, and suddenly the voices fade away as Lenu, urged by Lila (“Think what it means to have a small child”) goes to help a young woman manage a crying baby. A long family lunch in Naples with a local strongman shouting wildly, and in the midst of it all, Lenu shooting a reassuring glance at her little daughter, knowing Dede is frightened by the shouting. Has anyone written about motherhood in the way that Ferrante has? About how, even in the world of ideas and politics, one must always keep an eye on the children, for they must be dressed, fed, sent to school, and looked after. “Sooner forget my eyes or my hands.” Perhaps I am a bad reader. I knew Ferrante wrote under a pseudonym, but I never really obsessed over who she could be in ‘real’ life. The novels, which contain the “bare and throbbing heart” that Lenu describes, are more ‘real’ than any investigative report about royalty payments and real estate.

Independent Publisher

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Notable November Indie Press Releases

BY LAUREN WHITE / NOVEMBER 2016

Frantumaglia

By Elena Ferrante (Europa Editions)

This book invites readers into Elena Ferrante’s workshop. It offers a glimpse into the drawers of her writing desk, those drawers from which emerged her three early standalone novels and the four installments of My Brilliant Friend, known in English as the Neapolitan Quartet. Consisting of over 20 years of letters, essays, reflections, and interviews, it is a unique depiction of an author who embodies a consummate passion for writing.

In these pages Ferrante answers many of her readers’ questions. She addresses her choice to stand aside and let her books live autonomous lives. She discusses her thoughts and concerns as her novels are being adapted into films. She talks about the challenge of finding concise answers to interview questions. She explains the joys and the struggles of writing, the anguish of composing a story only to discover that that story isn’t good enough. She contemplates her relationship with psychoanalysis, with the cities she has lived in, with motherhood, with feminism, and with her childhood as a storehouse for memories, impressions, and fantasies. The result is a vibrant and intimate self-portrait of a writer at work.

The Buffalo News

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Books in Brief: The Beach at Night by Elena Ferrante, A Taste for Monsters by Matthew Kirby

By Jean Westmoore

The Beach at Night by Elena Ferrante; translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein; illustrations by Mara Cerri; Europa editions; 40 pages, $13.
…
Anyone familiar with the legendary Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet (beginning with “My Brilliant Friend”) will not be surprised to discover her illustrated fable, “The Beach at Night,” to be an intense, surprising, gritty, mysterious and frequently terrifying business and not exactly a story many would consider “suitable” for children.

The haunting, evocative illustrations begin with the cover image of a lifelike doll, apparently staring in horror on a littered, darkening beach. The tale is narrated by the doll, Celina, who has been left behind at the beach, forgotten by her owner and apparently replaced in the girl’s affection by her new pet cat. Celina is seething with jealousy (“I hope he has diarrhea and vomits and stinks so much that Mati is grossed out and gets rid of him”) and is suffering acutely from feelings of abandonment and loss.

Then the Mean Beach Attendant arrives with his Big Rake to comb the sand for debris – and possibly treasure – and Celina finds herself in dire physical peril. (For a sense of Ferrante’s gritty style, here is the attendant’s song, complete with expletive: “Open your maw, I’ve sh—for your craw, Drink up the pee, Drink it for me.” In another scene, boys are trying to see girls’ underwear and pee on their feet.) Celina is threatened by fire, by the sea, and most terribly, by the theft of her words including her own name, when rescue comes from a very surprising source.

This is a strangely compelling tale that will be of great interest to Ferrante fans, and marks a return, the author notes on her website, to a story that animated “The Lost Daughter,” the novel she considers to be a “turning point” in her development as a writer. – Jean Westmoore

BookReporter

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Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey

Reviewed by Rebecca Kilberg on November 18, 2016

I devoured the first three installments of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series in early 2015, soon after the publication of the third book’s English translation, and awaited the last with baited breath. Like many, I was swept up in the passion described in and elicited by the series — a story in four parts that follows the lives of two friends from girlhood to late middle age. The enthusiasm surrounding the books stemmed from disparate sources: some admired Ferrante’s intensely affecting and insightful account of women’s interior lives and friendships, others were drawn to the vivacious energy spilling off each page, while others were more captivated by the mystery surrounding the author’s identity.

Although she still has not disclosed her real name, the author reveals as much of herself as we are likely to ever know in FRANTUMAGLIA, a collection of letters and interviews done over nearly 15 years. With her signature verve, Ferrante discusses the cotton wool of an author’s life: her writing habits, habitual struggles as a writer, mother and woman, how stories develop over time. The letters also include guidance to directors undertaking her books’ transformations into movies, conversations with publishers and editors about current and future work, and relevant unpublished snippets.

“Even without having read the entirety of Ferrante’s oeuvre, a reader will thrill to learn in more depth of certain themes that haunt her.”

Even without having read the entirety of Ferrante’s oeuvre, a reader will thrill to learn in more depth of certain themes that haunt her. The close observation of the way material comes together to form clothing, its transformation from a piece of lifeless cloth to something that speaks volumes. The relationship between dear friends who vacillate between crushing and supporting one another. The deep ambivalence of a woman losing her individual identity to motherhood and the realization to which a daughter comes as she crosses the same bridge.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many variations of the same questions come up again and again regarding Ferrante as a female and feminist author and her stance on maintaining personal distance from her work. Both subjects are intensely personal for Ferrante the writer, and one must assume for whoever she is off the page as well. She decries the difficulty female authors have breaking from the modifier, eloquently describing how the media and literary world compare women only to each other, denying them their rightful places within the greater canon. Her thoughts on the decision to maintain a separate identity as a writer indicate an unusual and easy-to-admire perspective: that of a person who believes that what the reader needs to know about an author is already present in her work. If anything, her staunchness in this belief suggests that she has taken care to imbue her books with the power to stand on their own. From personal experience, I believe this to be true.

FRANTUMAGLIA comes at a particularly interesting time for English-speaking audiences. Elena Ferrante has served as the author’s pen name for decades in Italy, and her refusal to be unveiled continued even after she achieved international renown. Recently, a sleuthing journalist pinpointed the Italian woman who is most likely Ferrante. An uproar around the author’s privacy and frequently expressed intentions ensued, with most readers reacting with disgust and anger to her outing and refusing to acknowledge or change their relationship with the incognito author. FRANTUMAGLIA indicates that the author would surely gracefully accept the display of fierce loyalty on the part of her readers, but that she is someone who can defend herself. The pen, as they say…

The Guardian

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Best books of 2016 – part two

Maggie O’Farrell

Frantumaglia; Love Like Salt; My Name Is Lucy Barton

Maggie O’Farrell

Frantumaglia (Europa Editions) is an absorbing, tantalising journey into the private world of Elena Ferrante. I was halfway through it when the unconscionable, unforgivable exposure of her identity occurred (and may that man, Claudio Gatti, never know peace again).

Louise Doughty

The Good Immigrant; Another Day in the Death of America; Today Will Be Different

Louise Doughty

For Christmas, I would like two things: Elena Ferrante’s Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey (Europa Editions) and for the worm who publicised her real identity in newspapers around the world to find his turkey as dry, flavourless and pointless as his “exposé”.

The Guardian

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Best books of 2016 – part one

Blake Morrison

The Return; Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey; Solar Bones

Morrison

 The letters and interviews in Elena Ferrante’s Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey (trans Ann Goldstein, Europa), reveal all you ever need to know about the author of the Neapolitan Quartet, apart from the trifling matter of her identity.

James Meek

Everyone Is Watching; Memoirs of a Medieval Woman: The Life and Times of Margery Kempe

Meek

My cooking, cleaning and driving hours have been filled with Hillary Huber reading Elena Ferrante’s Naples quartet (trans Ann Goldstein, Europa/Blackstone). Not all writers adapt well to unabridged audiobookery; Ferrante, translated, does.

TLS – The Times Literary Supplement

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Books of the Year 2016

RUTH SCURR

Following the success of the Neapolitan Quartet, Ann Goldstein has now translated two further books by Elena Ferrante, both published by Europa Editions. The first, Frantumaglia: A writer’s journey, is a greatly expanded version of a book of letters, interviews and reflections on writing that first appeared in Italian in 2003. Cumulatively these fragments offer fascinating insights into Ferrante’s working methods and artistic purpose. The second, The Beach at Night, is a surreal and brilliant children’s book, beautifully illustrated by Mara Cerri, first published in Italy in 2007. Appearing in the anglophone world together in 2016, these books have overtaken the widely resented attempt to “unmask” Ferrante, and redirected attention back to her words.

FRANCES WILSON

Two books stand out this year, about the grubby world of writing and the ambi­valence of authorship. Elena Ferrante’s Frantumaglia: A writer’s journey (Europa) describes, through a selection of letters and interviews, what her editor calls “the now twenty-five-year history of an attempt to show that the function of the author is all in the writing”. Norma Clarke’s Brothers of the Quill (Harvard) follows Oliver Goldsmith’s rise from Irish hack to English national treasure. Goldsmith both cherished and reviled literary celebrity; Ferrante simply reviles it, and her insistence that her novels can speak for themselves is particularly moving in the light of her recent unmasking. For Goldsmith and his circle, “writing for bread” was “an unpardonable offence”, while authorship in eighteenth-century England was considered as lowly as Irishness itself. Both Ferrante and Norma Clarke say a great deal about the powerlessness of writers, and the growing authority of readers.

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Who would have thought Jhumpa Lahiri and Elena Ferrante had so much in common?

A scholar of the Italian language explores the ‘dissolving margins’ between Ferrante’s novels and Lahiri’s Italian work.

Who would have thought Jhumpa Lahiri and Elena Ferrante had so much in common?

In the six years that he spent in Mumbai as a teacher of the Italian language at Mumbai University, Roberto Bertilaccio acquainted himself with Hindi as well as bookstores around the city. But when he moved to Delhi in 2015, to concurrently teach Italian at Delhi University and Jamia Milia Islamia, Bertilaccio was surprised to find Italian novelist Elena Ferrante’s books in the bestseller sections of bookstores in the capital. His linguistic worlds were melding into each other as he watched the global appreciation for Ferrante, the Neapolitan quartet and the “exotic” appeal of Naples for the Anglophone world, as well as the buzz around Pulitzer-winning American novelist Jhumpa Lahiri writing in Italian.

That’s what got Bertilaccio to look into the works of both these acclaimed authors – who have a huge following in the Anglophone world – with a view to exploring common elements. To begin with, there is Ann Goldstein, the editor at the American magazine New Yorker, who has translated Ferrante’s books from Italian to English, as well as Lahiri’s Italian book In Altre Parole into the English In Other Words. Having immersed herself in the Italian language for much of the last decade, Lahiri moved to Rome, and has, at several literary fora, explained her reasons for not translating her own work in Italian into her prima lingua English.

However, Bertilaccio says he felt no uneasiness while reading In Altre Parole. “I was aware that the writer is not Italian and it isn’t her language. It is also not a novel and so the expectations were different. I did not feel any gap or distortion between whatever she is talking about and the style. I did not find her choice of word strange or unnatural or naive.”

‘Smarginatura’

Drawing on the critique of Ferrante by Tiziana De Rogatis, a professor at Università per Stranieri di Siena, Bertilaccio notes the common elements between Ferrante’s characters and Lahiri’s evolution with the Italian language as nothing short of “smarginatura”.

Ferrante has created new literary models of female identity, explains Bertilaccio. But while her characters are secure in themselves, even in their struggles, sometimes they are on the verge of crises, constantly struggling between choices.

“Smarginatura” – a word that Ferrante employs in her novels – cannot be easily translated into English. Goldstein has worded it as “dissolving margins” across Ferrante’s now-famous Neapolitan quartet. Said Bertilaccio, “Smarginatura is the experience of Lila, Ferrante’s character, right from the first book of the quartet My Brilliant Friend. Across all four books, Lila is in and out of margins. Compared to her friend Elena, she is the one who is constantly exposing herself (to situations) and is thus seen as less defensive.”

This exposing of oneself is extremely painful and yet vital for metamorphosis, and Lahiri, says Dr Bertilaccio, has expressed this kind of metamorphosis as important to her too, especially as she grasped the Italian language.

But Lahiri’s admiration of Ferrante, and of her own “smarginatura”, goes beyond mere fandom. Lahiri has previously spoken about how, having read Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment in English, she felt the desperate need to read it in Italian, and she did so as she developed her own skill as a reader of the language. She said:

“It was one of those reading experiences that changed my life, pushed me over the edge as a reader of the Italian language. I decided to write two letters to Ferrante, because I felt this was the only way I could express what effect she had had on me as a reader. I wrote to her about her choice as an author to be present solely in terms of her writing, at least for our consumption and accessibility, and my admiration for this radical step to not participate in the publication of her books…”

Giving her a vision beyond the surface, “smarginatura” happens unwillingly to Lila. For Lahiri to put herself in the uncomfortable situation of not just learning but also writing in a new language is also about seeing beyond the surface, even it that might cost her her self image.

Bertilaccio feels that Ferrante has influenced Lahiri’s writing style in the Italian. In Altre Parole was born out of a collection of essays that Lahiri wrote during the one-and-a-half years she lived in Rome, and was invited to write for the politics and literary magazine Internazionale about her experiences in Italy and with the language. “The complete book as it is today is much more complex and is a mix of genre.” Said Bertilaccio. “On the one hand, it is like a journal as she follows her experience in a chronological way, while on the other hand, it is a coming-of-age book: a child (in language) becomes an adult, through different experiences, becomes more aware. The book is also a theory on literature and writing.”

He elaborated on this inspiration: “Apart from ‘smarginatura’, the idea of ‘sorveglianza’ or ‘watchfulness’ is typical of Lila, whereby the woman is acutely aware of whatever is happening to her and her children. The word can denote the act of policing, but in this context it is the psychological state typical of women. Lahiri’s writing has that kind of ‘sorveglianza’, about her own literary steps into Italian, with a continuous questioning of her own explorations, to reach some clarity, in each chapter.”

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‘Innesto’

Lahiri’s journey also mirrors the “innesto” as experienced by another Ferrante character Leda. In The Lost Daughter (not part of the quartet) Leda abandons her two daughters for three years to escape from her unhappiness over the failure of “innesto” or “graft” – bonding – with her children. “Lahiri says her approach to the Italian language was also ‘innesto’, a graft, because inserting grafts are risky,” said Bertilaccio. “For Lahiri, the possibly ‘wrong graft’ with its imperfections is the premise of her book. For her, the frustration and the imperfection of a new linguistic process puts her closer to a new way of creativity.”

In Altre Parole is divided into different chapters, each with a title that is a metaphor, which is about Lahiri’s process of learning the different linguistic and cultural nuances of the language during her journey. Lahiri, Bertilaccio asserts, chooses to write from such a context of displacement.

Ferrante is absconding from her real identity by creating a new one, but is also speaking openly about her childhood experiences, her vision of global politics, through her publisher. In her new collection of essays and interviews, titled Frantumaglia – another word that is difficult to translate and could be best understood as debris – she recounts her childhood, adolescence, and her life as a teacher. “Ferrante is thus described as a character: not just as an author whose story isn’t known, but one with an identity and a story of the past,” said Bertilaccio.

But Lahiri has been erasing her English literary background and starting from scratch as a writer in Italian, throwing herself into the mouth of a new language, by ignoring her own existence as an award-winning writer in English.

“Here in Italy where I am very comfortable, I feel more imperfect than ever…every day when i speak and write in Italian, I meet with imperfection…this reveals that I am not rooted in this language…Why, as an adult, as a writer, am I interested in this new imperfection? What does this offer to me? I would say, a stunning clarity, a more profound imperfection…Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity…It stimulates…the more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive. I have been writing since a child to forget my imperfections, in order to hide in the background of life. In a certain sense, writing is an extended homage to imperfection…I consider a book alive only during the writing. Afterwards, at least for me, it dies.”

Books & Bachelorettes

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THE STORY OF A NEW NAME

I enjoyed this novel much more than its predecessor, My Brilliant Friend. After finishing MBF, I was unsure if I wanted to continue to read the series (there are four). After finishing SNN, however, I cannot wait to continue reading.

The Story of a New Name picks up right where My Brilliant Friend leaves off: at Elena’s best friend, Lila’s wedding. Lila, at sixteen, has decided that the only way for her to escape the poverty of her neighborhood and family is to marry the local grocer, who has pulled himself out of poverty via hard work and determination. Elena and Lila have grown up together, constantly competing to be the brightest in their class.

With her marriage to Stefano, Lila quits school and completely devotes herself to Stefano’s business enterprises, as well as Lila’s brother, Rino’s, shoe factory. Elena is thus left alone to navigate high school and eventually college.

While grounded in everyday concerns such as clingy boyfriends, nagging mothers, and homework, the real action in The Story of a New Name takes place in Elena’s mind. The most poignant passages describe Elena’s feelings about growing up, the importance of education, and her relationship with Lila.

The Story of a New Name’s author, Elena Ferrante, made headlines recently when a scholar claimed that he had discovered her true identity (Elena Ferrante is a pen name). The author has always expressed her wish to remain anonymous, and Claudio Gatti’s apparent disregard for her wishes caused quite an uproar.

This debacle is even more interesting when one considers how Elena’s heroine, also named Elena, publishes a novel in The Story of a New Name, and describes at length the pride she feels in seeing her name in print. If Elena Ferrante feels this way, one wonders why she chose to publish under a pen name.
*SPOILER AHEAD* I cannot wait to see where the rest of these novels go (there are two more in the series). I will say, if Elena ends up with Nino, which I am starting to believe may happen, I will be very disappointed because of Nino’s previous relationship with Lila. If, however, Elena ends up with someone else, I will continue to enjoy these novels. I highly recommend them to anyone, in particular any women with close female friends that they have spent their life growing up with.
-A