Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey (2003, this edition 2016) is a collection of Italian author Elena Ferrante’s letters, essays, and interviews over almost thirty years, compiled by the author.
The author has written pseudo-anonymously since 1992. The letters explain why she was a recluse, and why she wanted to hide her identity. Now she opens herself up – and invites readers into her workshop.
The letters are about the 2006 interpretation of her novel Troubling Love onto the movie screen. She also writes about her inspirations, which usually involve books, places, cities, and her homeland Italy and its politics.
The best parts are her inspirations (Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina) – and the impressions of her childhood that remain with her: cities ‘dangerous and exciting’, and car horns honking, holding her sister by the hand, running in the rain …’
I also like the sections when she is unpacking a scene, an episode, in a story. Sometimes I read the story the way she had depicted it and sometimes I didn’t, but isn’t that the interesting part – knowing what I brought to the interpretation as a reader, and what I take from it that I remember. What words, what faces, what scenes?
Ferrante also answers questions asked by journalists, interviewers, readers, and requests for information about her. Who is she? Why does she write anonymously?
One question to her was, ‘have you ever been in analysis?’ She writes about psychoanalysis, and feminist writing, disintegration, and redemption.
Is she a she? She says yes. And she stands by her writing without a face, for her words stand alone.
I think this books reveals more about other people’s anxiety in not knowing who she is and why she wants to be ‘disengaged’ from others (is she?): ‘Although you’ve chosen anonymity yourself, don’t you miss direct contact with your readers? Are you willing to give a brief description—and, if you like physical, as well—of yourself? ’The media appear to be less interested in literature, than in sensationalism.
Her response? Ferrante says the questions about her identity are ‘legitimate, but reductive.’ She adds, ‘As long as you write, you are only what you write; the nest is there, holding you, intertwined with you. The rest, what you are outside the writing, is an invisible gutter.’ And her best response is: ‘My books belong to those who read them.’
In a sense, this is a self-portrait. An intelligently beautiful one.
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MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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