A review by cubanita
Incidental Inventions by Elena Ferrante

4.0

This is not my favorite Ferrante book, but since I find her voice so compelling, I raced through the book anyway, recognizing, like an old friend, some of the essays that I had already read when they first appeared in the Guardian. The essays that had stayed with me still felt as strong, like the one about mothers that says, "For a long time, I felt that to stop loving her was the only way I had to love myself" and the one about linguistic nationalism which contains the treasured line I have been quoting for over three years now: "Translation is our salvation: it draws us out of the well in which, entirely by chance, we are born." Some of the other essays felt less memorable and I think the overall effect of gathering them all together in one volume only highlights this. Nevertheless, even less-than-memorable writing by Ferrante is still good writing and the brevity of this book makes it perfect for keeping on hand to read while waiting in line at your child's school pick-up, for example, or late at night when you are too tired to read more than a page or two. (Or maybe your attention span has been wrecked by pandemic disaster scrolling? This book would be good for those in that predicament as well.) The accompanying illustrations by Andrea Ucini, which appeared alongside her Guardian columns, are delightful. And, of course, the translation is impeccable, doing an excellent job of explaining some of the particularities of the Italian language to which Ferrante refers.