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A review by spenkevich
Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante
4.0
‘I felt that she imagined herself caught between two sets of pupils, expropriated by two gazes.’
Patriarchal societies don’t exactly have a good track record for women to occupy their own space, including their own bodies. The agency of the female body is central to Elena Ferrante’s debut novel, Troubling Love, and in this case it is a dead body found floating in a lake. Amalia, the narrator’s mother, has been found in a fancy bra she shouldn’t have owned in a lake en route to see Delia in Rome. Released in 1991, Troubling Love immediately put Elena Ferrante—a pen name for the anonymous author—on the literary map as she was awarded Italy’s prestigious Elsa Morante award. The short novel is a tightly knit terror of memory under the shadow of obsession and the ‘impression of looming violence’ as the narrator, Delia, finds herself in her childhood hometown as she pieces together the final days of her mother’s life. The past never stays buried and Delia finds herself haunted by the abusive men that discolored her childhood as they still roam a city depicted only in rot and ruin. Ferrante paints Naples as a dark landscape and with Troubling Love she delivers a gritty examination of women’s agency, mother-daughter relations and the fragility of the psyche.
Anna Bonaiuto as Delia in the 1995 film adaptation.
‘To speak is to link together lost times and spaces,’ Delia states, and the novel finds her past flooding back into her present, at times creating slipstream scenes where the Amalia of the past haunts Delia’s waking reality.Among the resurfacing past are the abusive of her childhood and what quickly unfolds is a tale of violent jealousy and a love triangle around Amalia that forever ended the friendship between Delia’s father, a painter, and his friend and salesperson, a man who goes by the name Caserta. It takes the cliche of young love triangle stories and infuses it with violence and suspicion, with Delia’s father assuming every motion of Amalia is an act of betrayal and frequently beats her under the assumption it is what she wants and deserves. Among these men, Delia is stuck with her Uncle as her only companion a man who ‘For forty years he had continued steadfastly to declare solidarity with his brother-in-law’ instead of his own sister, and was part of an act of violence against Caserta, accused of adultery.
In the present, these men are ‘drowning in undigested emotions,’ such as her father who, after punching his own daughter when she returns to see him is revealed as ‘just an old man deprived of any humanity by frustration and rage.’ After Amalia leaves him, he frequently followed and harassed her. Even Caserta has remained in lust for her, and in Amalia’s final days likely spent a few days out of town with him. As Delia runs about town quite literally with her mother’s dirty laundry (well played, Ferrante), she begins to question and understand her mother’s actions and theorize why, exactly, she came to be found a suicide in a lake with a curiously young wardrobe left behind.
‘I remember the horror and I feel it again every time someone in this city opens his mouth.’
The backdrop for the novel is a Naples drenched in descriptions of decay. Everything in the novel has ‘a strong odor’, the streets are full of lustful men touching her with groping hands or with leering eyes, and each scene is written to be damp and dirty. Nothing is pleasant and even the one sex scene, sex that was ‘compliance without participation’ is queasy and ‘without a moan, as if he were feeling no pleasure.’ Ferrante builds a tone of repugnance in every element of the novel, with bodily fluids being a frequent motif and metaphor.
For the body, particularly Amalias, is the central element in this book. We watch her body be dressed undressed, both literally and figuratively, as commentary on the male gaze and how Amalia was unable to escape from being only a sexual body to be exploited by those around her. Her own husband, in a toxic muse scenario, becomes a popular artist through a series of paintings oversexualizing his own wife’s body for profit. ‘[M]y mother bore inscribed in her body a natural guilt,’ Delia tells us, ‘independent of her will and what she actually did.’
A patriarchal society denying women the agency of their own selfhood is a frequent theme in Ferrante novels, one that is curiously mirrored in the scandals around her own attempts at anonymity. While Ferrante insists everything anyone needs to know about her is contained in her novels, there have been frequent attempts to unmask her, one particularly uncomfortable attempt even being printed by Claudio Gatti who insists her attempt to be anonymous makes it fair game to expose her and delved into housing and financial records of women to claim he found the true author. This is a pretty weird invasion of privacy, but one in keeping with Ferrante’s theme of men denying women a space of their own, including their own identity. In an interview with Vanity Fair she discusses how the attempts to unmask her stem from a misogyny, particularly the frequent insistence that she is actually a man. Personally, I don’t care to know who the ‘real’ Ferrante is, and I like to see her anonymity as a sort of performance piece that functions as an extension of her already impressive work.
Returning to Troubling Love, this guilt over the body has passed into Delia as well. Early in the novel we find her desiring to remove herself from the mother’s body and ‘had wanted to eliminate every root I had in her, even the deepest.’ As the novel progresses, she goes from wearing the dress her mother purchased for her to wearing her mother’s own dress, metaphysically occupying her mothers body and thoughts. ‘I didn’t want to be “I,” unless it was the I of Amalia.’ She cannot separate herself, past or present, from Amalia.
The book becomes highly engaging here, with the mystery mostly wrapped up but an internal struggle just beginning. Something Ferrante excels at is undoing the genre in which she is writing writes in, as she says herself in [b:In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing|58949461|In the Margins On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing|Elena Ferrante|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1643289838l/58949461._SY75_.jpg|92905166], detailing how as Delia tries to ‘adhere to the fixed rules of a small mystery story, until everything—the mystery genre itself&begins to break apart.’ We are left only with Delia’s version of events and guesses, the novel so firmly embedded in her flakey consciousness and no other version of the story to compare notes.
‘The story must be more fragile or more interesting than the one I had told myself.’
Initially I was underwhelmed with Troubling Love. It can be a bit obtuse and drags in the middle, but as the short novel concluded and the pieces came together it began to really charm me. This is a cerebral thriller, one without many thrills beyond the psychological, and the more I pondered this novel upon conclusion the more I was charmed by it. Ferrante is a fabulous writer and this caustic little book was only her early promise of what was to come.
3.75/5
‘Childhood is a tissue of lies that endure in the past tense’
Patriarchal societies don’t exactly have a good track record for women to occupy their own space, including their own bodies. The agency of the female body is central to Elena Ferrante’s debut novel, Troubling Love, and in this case it is a dead body found floating in a lake. Amalia, the narrator’s mother, has been found in a fancy bra she shouldn’t have owned in a lake en route to see Delia in Rome. Released in 1991, Troubling Love immediately put Elena Ferrante—a pen name for the anonymous author—on the literary map as she was awarded Italy’s prestigious Elsa Morante award. The short novel is a tightly knit terror of memory under the shadow of obsession and the ‘impression of looming violence’ as the narrator, Delia, finds herself in her childhood hometown as she pieces together the final days of her mother’s life. The past never stays buried and Delia finds herself haunted by the abusive men that discolored her childhood as they still roam a city depicted only in rot and ruin. Ferrante paints Naples as a dark landscape and with Troubling Love she delivers a gritty examination of women’s agency, mother-daughter relations and the fragility of the psyche.
Anna Bonaiuto as Delia in the 1995 film adaptation.
‘To speak is to link together lost times and spaces,’ Delia states, and the novel finds her past flooding back into her present, at times creating slipstream scenes where the Amalia of the past haunts Delia’s waking reality.Among the resurfacing past are the abusive of her childhood and what quickly unfolds is a tale of violent jealousy and a love triangle around Amalia that forever ended the friendship between Delia’s father, a painter, and his friend and salesperson, a man who goes by the name Caserta. It takes the cliche of young love triangle stories and infuses it with violence and suspicion, with Delia’s father assuming every motion of Amalia is an act of betrayal and frequently beats her under the assumption it is what she wants and deserves. Among these men, Delia is stuck with her Uncle as her only companion a man who ‘For forty years he had continued steadfastly to declare solidarity with his brother-in-law’ instead of his own sister, and was part of an act of violence against Caserta, accused of adultery.
In the present, these men are ‘drowning in undigested emotions,’ such as her father who, after punching his own daughter when she returns to see him is revealed as ‘just an old man deprived of any humanity by frustration and rage.’ After Amalia leaves him, he frequently followed and harassed her. Even Caserta has remained in lust for her, and in Amalia’s final days likely spent a few days out of town with him. As Delia runs about town quite literally with her mother’s dirty laundry (well played, Ferrante), she begins to question and understand her mother’s actions and theorize why, exactly, she came to be found a suicide in a lake with a curiously young wardrobe left behind.
‘I remember the horror and I feel it again every time someone in this city opens his mouth.’
The backdrop for the novel is a Naples drenched in descriptions of decay. Everything in the novel has ‘a strong odor’, the streets are full of lustful men touching her with groping hands or with leering eyes, and each scene is written to be damp and dirty. Nothing is pleasant and even the one sex scene, sex that was ‘compliance without participation’ is queasy and ‘without a moan, as if he were feeling no pleasure.’ Ferrante builds a tone of repugnance in every element of the novel, with bodily fluids being a frequent motif and metaphor.
For the body, particularly Amalias, is the central element in this book. We watch her body be dressed undressed, both literally and figuratively, as commentary on the male gaze and how Amalia was unable to escape from being only a sexual body to be exploited by those around her. Her own husband, in a toxic muse scenario, becomes a popular artist through a series of paintings oversexualizing his own wife’s body for profit. ‘[M]y mother bore inscribed in her body a natural guilt,’ Delia tells us, ‘independent of her will and what she actually did.’
A patriarchal society denying women the agency of their own selfhood is a frequent theme in Ferrante novels, one that is curiously mirrored in the scandals around her own attempts at anonymity. While Ferrante insists everything anyone needs to know about her is contained in her novels, there have been frequent attempts to unmask her, one particularly uncomfortable attempt even being printed by Claudio Gatti who insists her attempt to be anonymous makes it fair game to expose her and delved into housing and financial records of women to claim he found the true author. This is a pretty weird invasion of privacy, but one in keeping with Ferrante’s theme of men denying women a space of their own, including their own identity. In an interview with Vanity Fair she discusses how the attempts to unmask her stem from a misogyny, particularly the frequent insistence that she is actually a man. Personally, I don’t care to know who the ‘real’ Ferrante is, and I like to see her anonymity as a sort of performance piece that functions as an extension of her already impressive work.
Returning to Troubling Love, this guilt over the body has passed into Delia as well. Early in the novel we find her desiring to remove herself from the mother’s body and ‘had wanted to eliminate every root I had in her, even the deepest.’ As the novel progresses, she goes from wearing the dress her mother purchased for her to wearing her mother’s own dress, metaphysically occupying her mothers body and thoughts. ‘I didn’t want to be “I,” unless it was the I of Amalia.’ She cannot separate herself, past or present, from Amalia.
‘My mother, who for years had existed only as an annoying responsibility, at times nagging, was dead. But as I rubbed my face vigorously, especially around the eyes, I realized with unexpected tenderness that in fact I had Amalia under my skin, like a hot liquid that had been injected into me at some unknown time.’
The book becomes highly engaging here, with the mystery mostly wrapped up but an internal struggle just beginning. Something Ferrante excels at is undoing the genre in which she is writing writes in, as she says herself in [b:In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing|58949461|In the Margins On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing|Elena Ferrante|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1643289838l/58949461._SY75_.jpg|92905166], detailing how as Delia tries to ‘adhere to the fixed rules of a small mystery story, until everything—the mystery genre itself&begins to break apart.’ We are left only with Delia’s version of events and guesses, the novel so firmly embedded in her flakey consciousness and no other version of the story to compare notes.
‘The story must be more fragile or more interesting than the one I had told myself.’
Initially I was underwhelmed with Troubling Love. It can be a bit obtuse and drags in the middle, but as the short novel concluded and the pieces came together it began to really charm me. This is a cerebral thriller, one without many thrills beyond the psychological, and the more I pondered this novel upon conclusion the more I was charmed by it. Ferrante is a fabulous writer and this caustic little book was only her early promise of what was to come.
3.75/5
‘Childhood is a tissue of lies that endure in the past tense’