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In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing
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About This Book
Four new and revelatory essays by the author of My Brilliant Friend and The Lost Daughter In 2020, Claire Luchette in O, The Oprah Magazine described the beloved Italian novelist Elena Ferrante as "an oracle among authors." Here, in these four crisp essays, Ferrante offers a rare look at the origins of her literary powers. She writes about her influences, her struggles, and her formation as both a reader and a writer; she describes the perils of "bad language" and suggests ways in which it has long excluded women's truth; she proposes a choral fusion of feminine talent as she brilliantly discourses on the work of Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Ingeborg Bachmann, and many others. Here is a subtle yet candid book by "one of the great novelists of our time" about adventures in literature, both in and out of the margins.
Reviews
"Let's hope for a full-length memoir one day."
"makes the seemingly arcane problems of the writer feel immediate and vivid."
"Four essays illuminate the mind of Ferrante (The Lying Life of Adults) in this dazzling collection ..."
"pickings are slim ..."
"Although In the Margins may appeal most to Ferrante devotees like me eager to read about the ideas of fiction that led to novels like My Brilliant Friend and The Lost Daughter, the book will draw in anyone curious about literature and its creation ..."
"Despite its insights, I'm not sure this tour of Ferrante's own mind offers the same rewards."
"She is not shy about sharing the discoveries she made along the way, clawing her way to her own kind of realism."
"Still, we see glimpses of the shame, disappointment and struggle in these pages, albeit at a lower temperature."
"This slim but formidable book requires a special sort of Ferrante fan, but there are plenty of those."
"While each essay in the collection engages its own topic, all four cohere along this thematic through-line, offering critical insight into the question of how one can 'learn to use with freedom the cage we're shut up in.'"
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