Reviews

A collection of reviews and articles about Elena Ferrante‘s novels.

ActuaLitté

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Frantumaglia : Elena Ferrante pulvérise l’expérience autobiographique

ESSAI ROMANCÉ – Elena Ferrante avait débuté sa carrière sous couvert d’anonymat, par timidité, finit-elle par avouer. Ce masque l’a abritée dans un temps, puis protégée, malgré les tentatives de journalistes pour percer le mystère. Qui parle quand Elena écrit ? Quel personnage-auteur se profile donc ?

Voyager à travers l’écriture, quoi de plus dangereux, et de plus mensonger quand un pseudonyme nous promet de parler de sa vie et de l’écriture ? Le rapport de l’un à l’autre est complexe, mais la vérité n’est pas une fin en soi : ici, l’essai importe autant que la trame romanesque qui, somme toute, aboutit à une autre histoire, dans l’histoire. Elena Ferrante, quelle qu’elle soit, est une amoureuse de la littérature : dans les multiples exemples que contient Frantumaglia — lettres, courriers aux lecteurs, à l’éditeur, interviews, etc. — elle affirme une réflexion sur ce métier. Revenons sur un point : voilà plus de vingt ans que Ferrante publie des livres et écrit. Et à ce jour, elle incarne le plus grand secret, entretenu et jalousement préservé, quant à l’identité derrière le nom. Sauf que les lecteurs, eux, s’en moquent éperdument. C’est ainsi que l’ouvrage divise les questionnements en deux catégories : ceux qui interrogent sur sa vie personnelle, et sont éconduits, et ceux qui tentent de trouver les signes.

Car, en fin de course, Ferrante nous entraîne d’abord sur une authentique piste de réflexion : qu’est-ce donc qu’être auteure ? La première édition de La Frantumaglia fut publiée en Italie fin 2003, bien avant que le succès ne l’inonde : elle ne comptait alors que deux livres publiés, dont l’un, prix Elsa Morante, fut adapté au cinéma par Mario Martone, conférant une certaine aura à l’auteure. Cette édition enrichie, comme l’explique son éditeur, se double de multiples ajouts. En Italie, sa parution manqua d’être compromise par l’article de Claudio Gatti, qui fit paraître une enquête le 2 octobre 2016, où il affirmait avoir découvert la vérité autour d’Elena Ferrante. Un travail de fourmi et de patience, mais qui ne fit que lui attirer les foudres des lecteurs. Depuis toujours, Ferrante pointe le texte, seule chose qui importe. Et les rares éléments biographiques connus dans Frantumaglia servent avant tout à humaniser l’auteure. À l’incarner. Car elle est romancière d’un bout à l’autre, et si elle livre des données biographiques, ces dernières sont encore romancées, et l’on cherchera en vain les clefs — et plus encore, les serrures. Alors personnage ou auteure ? Les deux, en réalité : quand elle cite Freud et Totem et Tabou , c’est pour souligner le cas de cette patiente qui refusait de se servir de son nom, redoutant qu’on s’en empare pour lui dérober ensuite sa personnalité. De l’auteure au texte, en passant par la figure de l’auteur, les questions agitent la critique — quand bien même c’est le texte qui demeure. Et demeurera toujours.

The Dartmouth:“Neapolitan Quartet” is an immersive look at a female friendship

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On The Dartmouth

Jan 1, 2018 – Isabelle Blank

Italian writer Elena Ferrante’s operatic Neapolitan Quartet, a series that spans four volumes and six decades of friendship, traces the intertwined lives of characters Lila and Lenù. The series begins with Lenù and Lila’s childhood as they grow up in a poor Neapolitan neighborhood and traces their subsequent lives as wives, mothers and ultimately lonely old women. The quartet is a series of cyclical events encapsulated in a larger cyclical narrative structure. The first book of the series, entitled “My Brilliant Friend,” opens at the fourth book’s close. Rino, Lila’s son, telephones Lenù to tell her that his mother has gone missing. At the end of the final book, entitled “The Story of a Lost Child,” there is no answer as to where Lila has disappeared. However, Ferrante writes such a thorough description of Lila’s character and psyche throughout the series that, in the final book, it makes sense as to why she erased herself. It seems not to matter where she’s gone. Lila is mean, whip-smart and down-trodden — how could she not want to disappear, how could she not want to melt into what she calls the “dissolving boundaries” of her complicated world?

Ferrante weaves an intricate cloth depicting detailed scenes and characters that repeat themselves over and over to construct a patterned, sprawling tapestry. These intimate, very often domestic, scenes that Ferrante writes involve only the characters introduced in a list at the beginning of each volume. Though the scenes are private and the characters insular, the story conveys broad-reaching meditations on class, femininity and politics.

Lenù and Lila are foils for one another. Lenù is blonde, studious, eager to please, self-doubting and ambitious, whereas Lila is dark, naturally brilliant, mercurial, mean and irresistible to those around her. The story is told from Lenù’s point of view, but the two friends understand one another on such a deep and complex level that the reader is often privy to Lila’s perceived inner thoughts. The two are paradoxically bound to, yet at odds with, one another. Lenù cannot resist Lila’s magnetism, her cutting intellect and her unbounded passion even when Lila is at her most cruel. Ferrante’s prose is cerebral. The reader is immersed not only in Ferrante’s cinematic scenes, but also in Lenù’s body and her psyche. Ferrante lays bare Lila and Lenù’s most unlikable traits: their respective failures as mothers, their self-absorption, their gnawing anxiety, their seeming inability to experience joy and their mutual jealousy.

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San Diego Jewish World: Book Review: ‘My Brilliant Friend’

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On San Diego Jewish World

Jan 1, 2019 – Dorothea Shefer-Vanson

This novel, the first of a quartet, has become an international bestseller and has been widely praised in literary circles. So I was overjoyed when I was able to pick up a copy someone had discarded at one of the airports I visited recently. I found it a wee bit difficult to get into at first, but once I had overcome that initial barrier I found myself entranced by the account of the friendship between two girls, Elena (Lenu) and Lila, in one of the poorer neighbourhoods of post-war Naples. The book starts with their childhood, when they both still played with dolls, continues with their teenage years and adolescent agonies, and ends with the wedding of one of them, though still a teenager.

The author manages to describe the feelings and experiences of those childhood years, with the close but fluctuating relationship between the two girls, as well as between them and the people around them, in a vivid and engaging way. The writing style does not always read smoothly, and at times there are too many jerky stops and starts in the narrative flow for my taste, but the intensity of the emotions and events described help the reader to overcome any reluctance he or she might have to continue reading.

The first few pages of the book provide an index of the various families who comprise the main characters of the neighbourhood and the book, and I found this very helpful, as the Italian names and surnames are sometimes difficult to differentiate and thus to imagine the characters. After all, when half the boys are called Gino, Nino, and Rino, that does not help the reader to distinguish between them.

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