Books: Troubling Love. A novel by Elena Ferrante

I decided to give a second chance to Ferrante hoping to read something of the quality of Days of Abandonment. Troubling Love is satisfying to an extent. It is a bold and ambitious book which tries to capture the complexities of a mother-daughter love-hate relationship. The narrator Delia, struggles to understand her relationship with Amalia, her mother, on the day after her mother's death by drowning. As Delia puts it quite appropriately at some point: "I was here to cross a line". And she does cross that line. Occasionally, she also crosses the line of literary taste getting lost into convoluted psychoanalytical kitsch. Had the narrative been simpler, crisper, Delia's digging into the past in order to recover the truth buried under convenient post-factum rationalizations and lies, would have provided a more revealing and cathartic experience. The "truth" about Amalia's past, not surprisingly, revolves around her husband's jealousy, his violence, her lover (imagined by her child-daughter), her repressed sexuality. Delia both wishes for, and hates and fears her mother's erotic liberation. One of her childhood memories is of her sitting with her parents in a summer theater, her mother furtively glancing around in the dark, her father possessively putting an arm around her shoulder: "Amalia after a stealthy look sideways, curious and yet apprehensive, let her head fall on my father's shoulder and appeared happy. That double movement tortured me. I didn't know where to follow my mother in flight, if along the axis of that glance or along the parabola that her hair made in the direction of her husband's shoulder.I was beside her, trembling. Even the stars, so thick in summer, seemed to me points of my confusion. I was to such an extent determined to become different from her that, one by one, I lost the reason for resembling her." Good writing.

Books: My Brilliant Friend. A Novel by Elena Ferrante, 2011

This is the second novel by Ferrante that I read and it was a disappointing experience. It traces the friendship of two girls - Elena and Lila in Naples of the 1950s. As the publisher's description has it - the novel is set in "the poor but vibrant neighborhood" in the outskirts of the city. The phrase "poor but vibrant" is a horrible cliche which firstly does not mean anything and secondly by juxtaposing poverty and vibrancy masks a disdain for poverty which (thank God...) can be at least "vibrant"...At the beginning of the novel the girls are eight years old. Ferrante tries to imbue the details of their life with great significance - social and psychological which the two child characters cannot sustain. That is the problem with all novels about children - or stories told through the point of view of children - they are "retrospectively" excessively and annoyingly smart. The adult narrator transpires through the fake child's point of view and imposes her heavy schematics on the child's experience.

I guess, I have no patience for the drama of a lost doll.

In addition, the novel has dozens of characters - all very "vibrant" and "tough" - and the epic picture of a poor neighborhood, industriously built by Ferrante, feels like something I have read and seen (reference -- Italian neorealism) many many times before. The literary style that attracted me to this author in The Days of Abandonment now hangs in thin air, inflated and vain, unsupported by a story worth telling.