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A review by cameliarose
Incidental Inventions by Elena Ferrante
5.0
All my female friends are in awe of The Neapolitan Quartet and Elena Ferrante. I confess I haven’t read the books, although I have watched and loved the TV series. It is not because of the lack of interest, but my embarrassing avoidance of long multi volume books. So, when I heard that there was an essay collection by the same author, I immediately looked for it, and I was not disappointed.
52 brief essays in one slim volume. So very relatable. Some of my favourites:
Odious Women
Pregnant
Linguistic Nationality
Daughters
The Male Story of Sex
Women Who Write
Women Friends and Acquaintances
I could spend two hours quoting half of the book.
“Being Italian, for me, begins and ends with the fact that I speak and write in the Italian language.”
"I love my country, but I have no patriotic spirit and no national pride."
"I am Italian ... in the only way that I'm willing to attribute to myself a nationality. I don't like the other ways; they frighten me, especially when they become nationalism, chauvinism, imperialism and reprehensibly use language to WALL THEMSELVES IN, either by cultivating a purity as pointless as it is impossible, or by imposing language through overwhelming economic power and weapons."
“I greatly fear the generations who don’t proudly leave their parents behind, but I am also frightened by those who, at 20, leave their parents behind to embrace the morales of the grandparents and great-grandparents. I don’t understand the young people who would replace the world today with a “golden age” when everyone knew their place–that is, in an order based on sexist and racist hierarchies. Sometimes, especially when they declare themselves fascists, they don’t even seem like young people, and I tend to treat them even more harshly than the old people who inspired them. Dreaming of returning to a past is denial of youth and it grieves me to discover that young women, too, dream those dreams.”
52 brief essays in one slim volume. So very relatable. Some of my favourites:
Odious Women
Pregnant
Linguistic Nationality
Daughters
The Male Story of Sex
Women Who Write
Women Friends and Acquaintances
I could spend two hours quoting half of the book.
“Being Italian, for me, begins and ends with the fact that I speak and write in the Italian language.”
"I love my country, but I have no patriotic spirit and no national pride."
"I am Italian ... in the only way that I'm willing to attribute to myself a nationality. I don't like the other ways; they frighten me, especially when they become nationalism, chauvinism, imperialism and reprehensibly use language to WALL THEMSELVES IN, either by cultivating a purity as pointless as it is impossible, or by imposing language through overwhelming economic power and weapons."
“I greatly fear the generations who don’t proudly leave their parents behind, but I am also frightened by those who, at 20, leave their parents behind to embrace the morales of the grandparents and great-grandparents. I don’t understand the young people who would replace the world today with a “golden age” when everyone knew their place–that is, in an order based on sexist and racist hierarchies. Sometimes, especially when they declare themselves fascists, they don’t even seem like young people, and I tend to treat them even more harshly than the old people who inspired them. Dreaming of returning to a past is denial of youth and it grieves me to discover that young women, too, dream those dreams.”