5/13/2023 0 Comments Elena ferrante neapolitan novelsBy the time we reach “The Story of the Lost Child,” the fourth and final installment of the Neapolitan series, we have arrived at the 21st century and Elena, its narrator, is growing old. Ferrante gives us both the long answer and the short, and in doing so adumbrates the mysterious beauty and brutality of personal experience.įerrante is the by now famously anonymous Italian novelist whose works started appearing in 1992, though their setting is the Naples of the 1950s onward. “Do you want the long answer or the short?” is the customary divide between explanations versus outcomes in the retelling of events. That these two modes of storytelling - the compact and the commodious the modern and the historical the distilling of life into metaphor and its picaresque, riotous expansion - are so obviously the obverse of each other constitutes yet another narrative, the story of how an individual (more specifically, a woman) arrives, after the vicissitudes of living, at a definition of self. Elena Ferrante has written her story twice: once in a group of intense, highly modeled short novels whose action unfolds over a brief time span and again in the four sprawling, rambunctious, decades-spanning works that compose her Neapolitan saga.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |