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A review by alexluzparker
In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing by Elena Ferrante
5.0
There’s something about Ferrante’s writing that makes you sit up a little straighter and lean in a little closer. These lectures-turned-essays feel like a tight little cluster of tangled, knotted thread she’s slowly helping you unravel. With each sentence, another pull and something else falls loose until you get to the end and it’s all straightened out. With each seemingly disparate reference, personal anecdote or idea introduced her thesis comes into sharper clarity: That in order to produce a capital T Truth, we have to explore outside ourselves,
“Writing is seizing everything that has already been written and gradually learning to spend that enormous fortune. We mustn’t let ourselves be flattered by those who say: here’s someone who has a tonality of her own. Everything, in writing, has a long has a long story behind it. Even my uprising, my spilling over the margins, my yearning is part of an eruption that came before me and goes beyond me.”
But also, that we are also capable to alter that lineage with the addition of ourselves:
“ ‘Witchcraft was hung, in History,
But History and I
Find all the Witchcraft that we need
Around us, every Day—‘ (Emily Dickinson)
I believe that the pure and simple joining of the female “I” to History changes History. The History of the first line, the one that hangs the witch’s work on the gallows— note, something important has happened— is not, can no longer be, the History of the second, the one with which we find, around us, all the witchcraft we need.”
Even in her nonfiction writing, Ferrante maintains her knack for leaving her readers in quiet suspense, floating on the edge and clamoring for whatever’s next.
“Writing is seizing everything that has already been written and gradually learning to spend that enormous fortune. We mustn’t let ourselves be flattered by those who say: here’s someone who has a tonality of her own. Everything, in writing, has a long has a long story behind it. Even my uprising, my spilling over the margins, my yearning is part of an eruption that came before me and goes beyond me.”
But also, that we are also capable to alter that lineage with the addition of ourselves:
“ ‘Witchcraft was hung, in History,
But History and I
Find all the Witchcraft that we need
Around us, every Day—‘ (Emily Dickinson)
I believe that the pure and simple joining of the female “I” to History changes History. The History of the first line, the one that hangs the witch’s work on the gallows— note, something important has happened— is not, can no longer be, the History of the second, the one with which we find, around us, all the witchcraft we need.”
Even in her nonfiction writing, Ferrante maintains her knack for leaving her readers in quiet suspense, floating on the edge and clamoring for whatever’s next.