In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing by Elena Ferrante

Abstract

Reviewed by: In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writingby Elena Ferrante Enrica Maria Ferrara Elena Ferrante In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and WritingTrans. Ann Goldstein. New York. Europa Editions. 2022. 112 pages. elena ferrante's new book, In the Margins, is an exciting reading experience reminiscent of captivating nonfictional works such as Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium. It confirms that the Italian writer's global success stems from her ability to combine craftmanship—perhaps developed in that (often disregarded) hotbed of creative writing talents that is literary translation—and formal knowledge of the classics; independent research of noncanonical stories with the unbridled flow of an inspired writing that tends to spill out of the margins. In the Marginscomprises four essays: "Pain and Pen," "Aquamarine," "Histories, I," and "Dante's Rib." The first essay, which sets the tone for the collection and explains its evocative title, illustrates the author's struggle with two impulses, which she identifies as separate styles of writing: "the first compliant, the second impetuous." The first style abides by the rules dictated by authority—be it of teachers, editors, publishers, audiences—that requires us to stay within the set margins of what constitutes correct and beautiful expression; the other is vehement and unruly. Ferrante seems to be caught by surprise when the second mode manifests itself. This tends to happen because women writers are used to censoring their sensibility and training themselves to work according to set rules. To write like men, women struggle to hear their own voices. The account Ferrante gives us about the time in which she felt "becoming male yet at the same time remaining female," therefore "invisible," is poignant. What it really takes is for a woman to recognize her own value, escape her "abject" destiny, and create "a garment of words sewn with a pain of her own and a pen of her own." Paraphrasing a poem by fifteenth-century writer Gaspara Stampa, and corroborating her argument with examples from Virginia Woolf's A Writer's Diaryand Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable, Ferrante illustrates how hard it is to keep the two kinds of writing in balance. In the second thought-provoking essay, "Aquamarine," the author tackles the thorny issue of realism. Can we write reality as it is? We certainly can, Ferrante initially thought. But then she realized that the meaning of every object depends on its interactions with other objects and people. A beautiful aquamarine ring, belonging to the author's mother, is used to exemplify her reasoning: "the aquamarine was changeable, part of a changing reality, a changing me." Ferrante fans will be reminded of the bracelet in The Lying Life of Adults, which seems to possess magic powers, becoming a character in its own right. The bracelet shows how incompatible individuals become associated and confused in the mind of an observer when an object gets entangled with them. In that novel, the refined Costanza and the vulgar Vittoria become enmeshed as "the bracelet pressed them into one another and confused them, confusing me." There is no such thing as objective reality in Ferrante's oeuvre: the writing emerges not from a carefully drafted plan or from an epiphany of the real but from "collisions" between the narrator and the world "in which not only the narrator but the author herself, a pure maker of writing, was enmeshed." In other words, the narrator is not an external observer; she is deeply interconnected with that tangle, too. If these reflections confirm Ferrante's embrace of a neomaterialist worldview, they also help us make sense of that unruly writing tension she mentions in her first essay. Invoking the digressive literature of humours by Diderot and Sterne, the writer identifies the models of that impetuous style struggling against the margins of the written page. She then proceeds to tell us how, in her first three novels ( Troubling Love, The Days of Abandonment, and The Lost Daughter), she managed "to calibrate the two kinds of writing, using the more compliant for a slow-fake realist pace and the more unruly to break down with its fiction the fiction...