Smart, engaging, thought-provoking, and moving.
Elena Ferrante is Italy’s most celebrated living author, and widely revered around the world. Her Neapolitan Quartet, also known as My Brilliant Friend, has been adapted for screen, as has more recently, The Lost Daughter. Ferrante remains anonymous—her name is a nom-de-plume-and little is known about her. What is almost certain is that she has a scholarly background and possibly holds a current academic posting.
In 2020, she was asked to give three lectures at the University of Bologna. These are The Eco Lectures, established by fellow Italian writer Umberto Eco of Name of the Rose fame. Ferrante’s words would be delivered by an actor: that is how jealously she guards her anonymity. Of course along came the pandemic and the lectures were scrapped. But luckily, Ferrante had already written them. It is these three, along with a fourth essay composed for the conference Dante and Other Classics in 2021, that make up the collection.
In the Margins begins with the essay which gives the collection its name, Pain and Pen. Ferrante talks about writing in elementary school, needing to keep with the ruled, red, margins, and how that affected her later work.
“In my longing to write, starting in early adolescence, both the threat of those red lines … and the desire and fear of violating them, are still at work … I believe the sense I have of writing … has to do with the satisfaction of staying beautifully within the margins, and, at the same time, with the impression of loss, of waste, because of that success.”
Ferrante constructs writing as a process of loss: of constant, inevitable, dissatisfaction.
Aquamarine furthers this idea, using the framework of a ring her mother used to wear, and the seeming impossibility of describing it.
“Even if I could isolate it in a description … and give it a ‘sky-blue light’ in that formulation alone the stone lost its substance, became an emotion of mine … and turned opaque, as if it had fallen into water or I myself had breathed on it.”
Histories, I expands on the role of the narrator: the narrator, even in a third-person work, as character. She bases much of her discourse around Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
The final essay, Dante’s Rib, explores the character of Beatrice in Dante’s work.
These are works of rigour and intellect, dipping into and quoting other writers such as Samuel Beckett, Gaspara Stampa, Virginia Woolf, and Maria Guerra. It is undoubtedly of interest to students of literature, readers, writers, and anyone who wants to learn more about Elena Ferrante. Yet it also satisfies on a literary level like one of her novels, the beauty of her writing lifting this well above dry literary discourse.
In the Margins is a slim volume which can be read in a day, beautifully translated as always by Ann Goldstein, and delightfully designed by Europa editions.
A great way to keep your Ferrante fix going until she publishes a new novel!
Reviewed by Tracey Korsten
Twitter: @TraceyKorsten
This review is the opinion of the reviewer and not Glam Adelaide.
Distributed by: Allen & Unwin
Released: March 2022
RRP: $24.99
More News
