Book review: Author Ferrante is not needed

Frantumaglia is Elena Ferrantes mom's expression of ”how she felt when she was torn here and there by painful and conflicting impressions. Elena Ferrante himself uses it to describe her. – how she painstakingly collects and sorts minnesfragment, dreams, barndomsföremål, relationships and replicas, and in the end dispose of the most.

in Addition, is ”La frantumaglia” the original title of ”Ferrante of Ferrante”, the collection of letters, essays and interviews written between the years 1991 and 2016, which is now given out in a Swedish translation. Ferrantefebern that swept over the world in and with Neapelkvartetten, the four books of childhood friends Elena and Lila, is contagious. At the end of last year, the HBO series based on the books premiered.

Read more: ”What the girl is ugly” from ”Ferrante of Ferrante”

consists of three parts, of which part two and three have been added since the first release in 2003. The first part related therefore mainly Elena Ferrantes first two novels, the ” Painful love” and ” Days of solitude”, also the recently released in English. In a bunch of letters between Elena Ferrante and her loyal publisher, with the directors filmatiserar her books, and the adoring Italian journalists emerges, above all, a picture of a neurotically-inclined writer who constantly excuse themselves for all the problems she is causing by writing under a pseudonym.

Already in the book's very first letter, to the Italian publisher, who jokingly wondered how she intends to assist in the marketing of the future, she comes out as a well-mannered martyr: ”If you do not want to continue working with me, then say it immediately, I will understand. It is absolutely not necessary for me to produce this book.”

Tv review: HBO's Ferranteserie is completely loyal with the young women,

she, however, increasingly less inclined to excuse themselves. The book's second part contains an interview with an Italian journalist, where she at the fifth question in a row about its controversial identity roars away, why ask not, then, a journalist on literature, if it is so annoying to her hidden identity gets in the way of it? When the question thereon related to the ”riddle Ferrante” she gives up: ”There, you see. What should I say?”

the Most interesting is when Elena Ferrante avoid dodging the question of his real identity. When she widens out if she actually is interested in, as in the passages about the relationship between mother and daughter, male jealousy, or the surprising pleasure of writing to order, she is sometimes sour humorous, sometimes moving lucid.

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is basically a declaration of love, albeit a complicated and contingent – to a whole range of things: Naples, literature, writing, woman, love itself. But it also makes the book, in a way, is completely superfluous, because her novels in themselves are just as complex declarations of love that ever the letters and the essays.

Elena Ferrante may finally – and maybe unfortunately, for the ample the book's part – right in what she calls her ”little battle” for anonymity. The author is not needed. The author writes enough, at least in this case, good and well.