Showing posts with label Elena Ferrante. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elena Ferrante. Show all posts
Whoever is selecting the cover art for Ferrante's novels should be summarily dismissed. The covers look like cheap, mass market trade paperbacks of the chick lit genre, the kind that make Costco the world's biggest bookseller (depressing), but inside is the most well-plotted dirty realism being written today, and the added thrill is the stories are all set in the gangster-normalized city of Naples, giving them an exotic, travel-read feel for those of us in the West. None of the English-language reviews I've read mention how skilled Ferrante is at plotting: they all focus on her incredibly layered treatment of female friendship, the quality of her psychological insights, the beauty of her language. Which are all there and all valid and essential, of course, but what binds these aesthetic concerns together with an inalterable power is the constant zigzag of the characters' fortunes. Deft storytelling, in the ancient sense. Lovers cheat in spectacularly flagrant ways, friends get shot on church steps, small children disappear, riches turn to rags, beauties turn fat and bitter, underdogs become millionaires through their own blistering effort. I read late into the night because I had to know what would happen next with Nino; I often felt deliciously shocked by Ferrante's mastery of upsetting my expectations. Long passages of dense exposition often end with tantalizing cliffhangers: and then so-and-so was taken by the police to jail. And the reader is delighted, frustrated-delighted, at not having seen it coming.    
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The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante

"On December 31st of 1958 Lila had her first episode of dissolving margins. The term isn't mine, she always used it. She said that on those occasions the outlines of people and things suddenly dissolved, disappeared. That night, on the terrace where we were celebrating the arrival of 1959, when she was abruptly struck by that sensation, she was frightened and kept it to herself, still unable to name it. It was only years later, one night in November 1980 - we were thirty-six, were married, had children - that she recounted in detail what had happened to her then, what still sometimes happened to her, and she used that term for the first time."
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My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

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