For a third summer in a row, we are delving into the world of Elena Ferrante. This time around, our series of four seminars will focus on Elena Ferrante’s standalone novels, bringing them into conversation with feminist writing. We will read Troubling Love (L'amore molesto), The Days of Abandonment (I giorni dell'abbandono), The Lost Daughter (La figlia oscura), and The Lying Life of Adults (La vita bugiarda degli adulti), alongside the work of feminist writers whose work we love.
Across these four short novels, Ferrante tackles questions of desire, heartbreak, the violence inflicted upon women within a patriarchal world, grief, the relationship between mothers and daughters, the gendered, unforgiving, labour of parenting, the connections between language and class, in her effort to chronicle the lives of women. And while Ferrante’s protagonists grow up and grow out of the specific conditions of the Italian South, we find that these experiences translate across geographical and temporal boundaries.
This August, we will meet every Friday (7, 14, 21, 28) to discuss friendship, dissolving margins, and motherhood, while also working through questions of translation, class, gender, sexuality, as well as other emotions and ideas these novels have ignited.
We invite you to join us, whether you’ve read the novel discussed each week or not! Each conversation will be open to all levels of familiarity with Ferrante’s work and we will provide passages from the novels themselves, as well as excerpts from other texts, that have informed our own reading. As always, we invite you to read Ferrante in the original Italian, Ann Goldstein’s English translation, or any other language through which you encountered her work. Translation, and its impact on our reading of Ferrante, will be a major theme throughout our conversations.
We will meet at Tills Bookshop by the Meadows for an intimate discussion, surrounded by second-hand books at 19:00 on August 7, 14, 21 and 28. Join us for another Ferrante summer!
Troubling daughters, wayward mothers, and class in Elena Ferrante and Annie Ernaux.
‘I knew I was losing my mother definitively and that was exactly what I wanted.’
In Troubling Love (translated by Ann Goldstein), Elena Ferrante’s first novel, Delia grapples with her mother’s death, as she unexpectedly has to return to her childhood home in Naples. As Delia tries to reconstruct both her mother’s final days and certain suppressed moments from her own childhood, we are led in a compulsive, discomforting journey through Naples. Troubling Love deals with memory, women’s bodies and the violences inflicted upon them, but at its core it is a novel about the relationship between mother and daughter, and the alienation upward social mobility can bring. Annie Ernaux in A Woman’s Story (translated by Tanya Leslie) recounts her mother’s life, who dropped out of school at twelve, and maps the ways the two of them grow to speak in a different language and to lead different lives. Across A Woman’s Story and Troubling Love both, there is an urgency with which Ernaux and Ferrante describe the aftermath of losing a mother; the grief that collapses boundaries between past and present.
Join us on Friday, August 7th, to discuss Ferrante and Ernaux, mothers and daughters, language and class. You are welcome to join us if you’ve read Troubling Love, A Woman’s Story, both, or either. We will provide passages from the novels themselves, as well as excerpts from other texts, that have informed our own reading. (Like Natalia Ginzburg's brilliant short story ‘The Mother’!)
Women writing: feminist revolt in language explored through The Days of Abandonment
The Days of Abandonment (trans. Ann Goldstein) is a short, furious book about a woman whose life and mind disintegrate. Olga, abandoned by her husband, loses her grip on time, and the domestic order that had contained her. She forgets words, loses whole hours, gets locked in her own flat. As a novel, it is claustrophobic, savage, devastating, and occasionally very funny. It’s also a fierce example of writing that attempts the destruction of patriarchal language to find a way to write as a woman untethered. As Olga rages, her language begins to falter, to melt, to refuse, and her grammar begins to break under the pressure.
We'll be reading Ferrante’s second novel alongside the words of women who also sought to find new ways for women to write: Hélène Cixous whose notion of l'écriture féminine asked women to write with their bodies and break the sentence while they were at it; and the Italian radical Carla Lonzi who, with the women of Rivolta Femminile, rejected emancipation on men's terms and insisted women think from their own experience. We’ll also read short extracts from other fictional writing about women on the edge – works that bend and upend normal expectations of language while exploring the effect of the patriarchy on women’s lives.
Readings will be provided on the day. All you need is a willingness to read Olga's worst days closely, and to explore what kind of writing they demand.
Unnatural mothers: motherhood, disobedience and disgust in The Lost Daughter.
“I am an unnatural mother” confesses Leda out loud, at the culminating point of The Lost Daughter. Leda is a university lecturer in her late forties, divorced, her daughters grown and living their brilliant lives in Canada with their fathers. She’s on holiday, on her own, in the Italian South. Nothing appears to be wrong, but when she meets a Neapolitan family on the beach an underlayer of secrets, shame and ambivalence around her role as a mother starts to be uncovered. Exactly a century before the publication of La figlia oscura, another story about ambivalent motherhood hit the shelves of Italian bookshelves causing scandal for its terrible honesty. Today, A Woman by Sibilla Aleramo (a pseudonym, like Elena Ferrante!) is considered to be the first feminist Italian novel.
During this session we will put these two novels in conversation, while also exploring Ferrante’s use of disgust with the help of Barbara Creed’s The Monstruous-Feminine and Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotions.
Ugliness and spite: coming of age and generational conflict in The Lying Life of Adults
In The Lying Life of Adults (trans. Ann Goldstein), Giovanna overhears her father, Andrea, compare her to his estranged sister, Vittoria, in whom “ugliness and spite were combined to perfection.” This comparison begins to unravel Giovanna’s life, which so far has been carefully curated by her middle-class parents and contained within Naples’ richer neighborhoods. As Giovanna reconnects with Vittoria, and her father’s working-class, erased past, her pristine family life begins to disintegrate at its seams.
Bringing together our previous conversations on troubling daughters, feminist revolt in language, and monstrous female figures, in this final seminar, we will explore Ferrante's portrait of adolescence and female becoming alongside Donatella Di Pietrantonio's A Girl Returned, another powerful Italian novel in which a young girl's sense of identity is suddenly and irrevocably undone. Together, these novels ask what it means to grow up when the adults around you are unreliable, mothers and mother figures are both guides and mysteries, family is more fragile than it seems, and becoming a woman means navigating the competing demands of class, beauty, and belonging.
We'll also bring these conversations into dialogue with short extracts that explore the idea of female ‘ugliness’: Mieko Kawakami's Breasts and Eggs and Violette Leduc's La Bâtarde. Come and join us to think through the words of female writers, and to explore the forces that shape a girl's journey into adulthood: class, family, the body, beauty, shame, and the complicated women who come before her.