Paris Review interview now online (and she's started following me on twitter---uh-oh):http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6370/art-of-fiction-no-228-elena-ferrante
― dow, Thursday, 4 June 2015 00:17 (nine years ago) link
Maybe she confused you with tattoo artist?
― Faron Young Folks (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 4 June 2015 02:05 (nine years ago) link
who?
― dow, Thursday, 4 June 2015 02:21 (nine years ago) link
who's the tattoo artist, I mean
I dunno I looked at your twitter and you had a namesake with that profession.
― Faron Young Folks (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 4 June 2015 02:22 (nine years ago) link
Your name plus a one ("1") at the end
― Faron Young Folks (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 4 June 2015 02:23 (nine years ago) link
*starts following Elena Ferrante*
― xyzzzz__, Thursday, 4 June 2015 09:12 (nine years ago) link
Afraid I don't tweet or twitter. Any updates?
― Faron Young Folks (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 5 June 2015 02:12 (nine years ago) link
Her account seems to be a lot of re-tweets from other people's praise. Her own tweets are in Italian.
That interview was great, lots to say but I already said it. On twitter :-)
― xyzzzz__, Friday, 5 June 2015 09:44 (nine years ago) link
finished my brilliant friend the other day. completely adored it and can't wait to read the next. only caveat would be to suggest to ferrante-virgins: read days of abandonment first. they're both probably equally amazing but days just jumps out at you in a way the trilogy doesn't. it's like a fever dream, while the trilogy so far is actually pretty happy
― flopson, Friday, 5 June 2015 21:21 (nine years ago) link
jesus really? i'm nearing the end of MBF right now and the whole thing seems suffused with dread
― goole, Monday, 8 June 2015 19:16 (nine years ago) link
my brilliant friend still has that hope springing from the upward trajectory of young life: lenu's academic progress, the cerullo shoe factory. also there's a beautiful, complex friendship at the centre of it. whereas days of abandonment is just 'husband left me and dog is shitting blood while i've locked myself out of the house' and the only glimmer of hope or friendliness is a sad, flaccid neighbour.
― flopson, Tuesday, 9 June 2015 16:42 (eight years ago) link
can't wait!
― goole, Tuesday, 9 June 2015 17:02 (eight years ago) link
https://twitter.com/reynoldsmichael/status/601028422865915905
― xyzzzz__, Friday, 12 June 2015 21:15 (eight years ago) link
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1609452860/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1609452860&linkCode=as2&tag=conversatio07-20&linkId=5XDCXBIYPMGBKW5Q
the final part - its nearly here.
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 5 August 2015 19:46 (eight years ago) link
Saw that the other night
― Eternal Return To Earth (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 5 August 2015 19:55 (eight years ago) link
Automatic thread bump. This book is dropping next week.
— System
― Is It POLLING, Bob? (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 25 August 2015 17:23 (eight years ago) link
have received a copy of vol 4 through cunning means, but have not yet read vol 3, so my smugness is misplaced
― as verbose and purple as a Peter Ustinov made of plums (James Morrison), Wednesday, 26 August 2015 01:15 (eight years ago) link
you a lol blogger?
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 26 August 2015 12:15 (eight years ago) link
i have a well-connected and kindly cousin
― as verbose and purple as a Peter Ustinov made of plums (James Morrison), Wednesday, 26 August 2015 23:47 (eight years ago) link
Looking forward to part 4, should be out in Danish in spring 2016.
#1 remains my favorite and I'd rank them 1 > 2 > 3 but maybe 4 will wrap everything so nicely as to trump them all...
― niels, Thursday, 27 August 2015 12:07 (eight years ago) link
I've only read 1 and started 2. Feel like I should maybe reread 1 before proceeding further.
― Exile's Return To Sender (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 27 August 2015 14:53 (eight years ago) link
^ Yeah, same. I've read a couple chapters of the second. I liked the first, but just priority-wise I'm not sure if I want to keep going.
― jmm, Thursday, 27 August 2015 15:03 (eight years ago) link
I mean once you get going on 2 & 3 they're real page turners, the writing is good and the whole milieu is great so def recommend them to anyone
― niels, Thursday, 27 August 2015 15:19 (eight years ago) link
long interview -
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/elena-ferrante-interview-the-story-of-the-lost-childhttp://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/elena-ferrante-interview-the-story-of-the-lost-child-part-two
― just sayin, Monday, 31 August 2015 09:49 (eight years ago) link
'the storey of the lost child' is probably the best of the four, searing, i think, its really incredible
have any of you read it? dont want to spoil it but have been dying to examine some of the pieces
― dead (Lamp), Tuesday, 1 September 2015 19:14 (eight years ago) link
Its good to know that you (who didn't like it as much as some of us) found this great.
I have seen this in the shops but haven't got it as I want to finish a couple of things first (funnily enough Mandelstam's Hope Abandoned does examine her friendships with Akhmatova and others too).
Please start talking about it. I just won't look at this for a while.
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 2 September 2015 08:36 (eight years ago) link
To wait for the Danish translation or buy the English version... that's a tricky question.
― niels, Wednesday, 2 September 2015 08:52 (eight years ago) link
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/joanna-biggs/i-was-blind-she-a-falcon
LRB almost never publish a review to coincide with publication..
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 2 September 2015 12:39 (eight years ago) link
i liked that review a lot although the parts about 'genre fiction' sent it (and me) off the rails. its one of the few that has mentioned what i think is most powerful and disquieting about reading them, their intense physicality, the way ferrante insists on the mind being bound to the body. i have a vague memory of feminist essay i read as a teenager where the author claimed that the astronaut in his spacesuit was the patriarchal ideal. pristine, white, mechanical, armored, divorced from the messy flesh of being. and i think its interesting to contrast the heaviness of ferrante's characters with the weightlessness of knausgård (to cast around for the closest example at hand). i had such trouble with the earlier parts particularly 'the story of the new name' because its wearying. walking up the last flight of tenement stairs after a long day of work. ferrante links the mental - art, friendship, intellect - to occupation of physical space in a way that seems radical, feminist.
idk theres a lot i liked thinking about here particularly the way that art forces coherence on life, that it attempts to coalesce, define boundaries, delineate identities. how false that can feel, how important truth is.
― dead (Lamp), Wednesday, 2 September 2015 15:27 (eight years ago) link
i lost my copy of brilliant friend somewhere :/
― goole, Wednesday, 2 September 2015 16:00 (eight years ago) link
I am not sure I am getting where the shorter older stuff is more 'polished'. Both phases of her writing life present bks that are very fast and addictive as a read. To do with the short chapters and I also think she devised a bunch of characters and placed them in a universe that enabled her to write in this feverish mode for hundreds of pages...this comes back to the literary vs. genre opposition which the LRB peddles and I don't really like that.
That aside I liked the review.
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, 2 September 2015 19:47 (eight years ago) link
Not read the bk or this artcile but love the headline:
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1604540.ece
― xyzzzz__, Thursday, 10 September 2015 10:27 (eight years ago) link
Just finished (prob re-read some of) The Story of The Lost Child, and I predict another comeback hit for Elena Greco, which I hope she won't come to hate, as she says of her first comeback, A Friendship. Though she as her character/perhaps truest self yet, ends up on the page like she does (won't spoil, but she's somewhat bummed out/dissatisfied, as has often happened of course), hope she regards this as confessional validation, as much as possible, of her own worth, beyond being the well-scrubbed little girl from the ghetto who made good by following the now quaint rules for moderns, in a mediocre, backstabbing world. But of course, the Devil has the best lines.Some of this Elena-Lenu x Lina-Lila (who seem to be merged in the voice of pre-Neapoliton Novels Ferrante, judging only by excerpts)may come from the back and forth of Anna the publicist, called Anita in the Neapolitan neighborhood recently visited (lost the link), and her novelist husband, or maybe not. But my experience in English makes translator Ann Goldstein seem invaluable, re the rough elegance and sometimes poetic turns of phrase, though the turns of the whole story must come through in the original as well, I assume---anybody read it in Italian??
― dow, Tuesday, 22 September 2015 16:19 (eight years ago) link
I think this was at least *mostly* written by a woman, with husband or other editorial pushback/critiques, as every writer needs.
― dow, Tuesday, 22 September 2015 16:24 (eight years ago) link
There's also the sense that, as Ferrante's referred to it in interviews, this is not a quartet, but one story (a multi-volume novel, like her childhood 19th Century heroes tended toward). So Elena Greco stops it at a good place, but it doesn't really seem like The End; she may still be writing, whenever there are new developments---but we'll probably (?) be left to speculate, as she does, and leaves spaces for us to do so in these books (so much detail, but she knows when to leave room for our brains, I think---def leaves a lot to be learned about Italy and everywhere else, no matter how much she says).
― dow, Tuesday, 22 September 2015 16:33 (eight years ago) link
seems like this is everywhere lately
― hot doug stamper (||||||||), Tuesday, 22 September 2015 17:30 (eight years ago) link
One of the big questions for up-from-the-bottom literary careerist Elena Greco is and always has been: how do you creatively represent/tap into your origins---semi-familiar to many, in terms of their undeniable churn, their real-life-whatever-that-is melodrama---without breaking faith, without (over-) exploiting the people you still care about? As a product of the 50s-60s-70s (etc.) American Deep South, I def get some of the problems of this Southern Italian, especially when---well, I don't want to be accused of spoilers (not that most of this turned out like I expected).
― dow, Saturday, 26 September 2015 18:49 (eight years ago) link
Greco's doubts about her own degree of artistic achievement, incl. integrity---oh yeah, and basic (?) talent, esp. compared the self-semi-tutored genius and/or charisma of you know who---are presented as plausible and entertaining.
― dow, Saturday, 26 September 2015 18:57 (eight years ago) link
seems like this is everywhere lately― hot doug stamper (||||||||), Tuesday, September 22, 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
― hot doug stamper (||||||||), Tuesday, September 22, 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
Good.
― xyzzzz__, Saturday, 26 September 2015 19:18 (eight years ago) link
Reading book two - immediate punch in the face, every paragraph feels like it's one word away from exploding violently. The first one set this up so beautifully and here it's just one KO after the other.
On my paperback cover a quote by a critic reads "Imagine if Jane Austen got angry and you'll have some idea ..." - I don't get it.
― abcfsk, Thursday, 1 October 2015 22:09 (eight years ago) link
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/03/this-best-selling-author-is-still-anonymous.html
Reading this at the mo - for literary tourism its pretty good.
Made me laugh:
(Why is Shakira always on the radio in Southern Italy?)
― xyzzzz__, Saturday, 3 October 2015 18:11 (eight years ago) link
Nice this quotes Shirley Hazzard - whom I am reading (though its not been a great week for reading anything) - Bay of Noon is another Naples book.
― xyzzzz__, Saturday, 3 October 2015 18:17 (eight years ago) link
On Austen http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/16/sense-and-sensibility-jane-austen-elena-ferrante-anonymity
― abcfsk, Tuesday, 20 October 2015 21:06 (eight years ago) link
Great link, thanks. Pasted yr post on What Are You Reading?
― dow, Thursday, 22 October 2015 01:45 (eight years ago) link
― flopson, Tuesday, 9 June 2015 16:42 (5 months ago) Permalink
― goole, Tuesday, 9 June 2015 17:02 (5 months ago) Permalink
yah p much
― thwomp (thomp), Monday, 9 November 2015 03:16 (eight years ago) link
Finished book 4 saturday, it's been a great ride, kind of feel - and this sounds maybe a bit over the top but I think it could be true - like a slightly better person now
― niels, Monday, 9 November 2015 17:51 (eight years ago) link
two thirds of the way through part one, will probably get the next three tomorrow
― thwomp (thomp), Tuesday, 10 November 2015 04:15 (eight years ago) link
i don't know how much i can say other than pointing at bits and saying, huh, this is great, huh
it's also very--i mean, for a highbrow lit hit it's also kind of soap-opera functional in a way i can see my mother enjoying (in fact i am probably going to get my mother a copy of the first one, we'll see how that goes)
― thwomp (thomp), Tuesday, 10 November 2015 04:16 (eight years ago) link
I think a lot can be said abt these books apart from the writing being outstanding
It's interesting to me that a novel with a relatively conservative form can seem so contemporary and alive - in part because the writing's fresh, in part because the themes it deal with resonate with current ideas on privilege, democracy, sexual roles, the body
great post upthread about the heaviness of bodies in ferrante (juxtaposed knausgaard)
― niels, Tuesday, 10 November 2015 12:20 (eight years ago) link