The Ferrante Letters

November 4, 2019
As this thoughtful and thought-provoking compilation records, over the summer of 2015 four English professors decided to try out a new approach to criticism. Seeking to carry out a flexible, “permeable” dialogue instead of solitary study, Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards (from, respectively, Princeton, Oxford, Adelphi, and Yale), settled on Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. In hopes of “encoding the intimate labor of conversation as part of a scholarly work,” they exchanged letters recording their responses, both intellectual and visceral, to reading Ferrante’s epic tale of female friendship in post-WWII Italy (“Oh Nino,” Richards laments of one character, “why are you such a tool?”). Ferrante’s stylistic choices produce debates about narrator reliability, the erasure of women from public spaces, and the tension, in Emre’s words, between the “incessant need to minister to another human being” experienced by mothers and the “unbroken time and seclusion” sought by writers. The letters are followed by more considered essays from each contributor written a few years later, including Emre’s on what Ferrante’s decision to remain pseudonymous says about the nature of authorship. Several guest writers also contribute their thoughts in an appendix. The combination of intellectual rigor and personal reaction makes this fascinating reading for Ferrante fans.

November 15, 2019
Four female scholars reflect in "sociable cacophony" on Italian novelist Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet. When English professors Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards decided to exchange letters about the Neapolitan Quartet, they hoped that "each letter would build on the arguments of previous letters." They posted their correspondence, which took place during the summer of 2015, on a blog dedicated to their unique experiment in collective critical inquiry. Their primary goal was "the cultivation of a distinct ethical subject: a reader who was deliberately oriented to the ongoing and pleasurable labor of criticism." This book, which developed as an afterthought, gathers together those correspondences while offering one essay by each professor on different facets of the quartet. In the first section, readers are immediately immersed in a series of short exchanges among the professors that are as literarily engaged as they are engaging. The authors intermingle critical meditations on meaning, structure, and themes like friendship, motherhood, and authorship with observations on their own lives as women, mothers, lovers, and writers. Each author then takes ideas forged within this epistolary crucible and develops them into the essays that make up the second section of the book. Where Chihaya considers the pleasure of "rupture and dissolution" in Ferrante's work, Hill examines the interplay of the fictive and the real. Richards explores what she calls Ferrante's "counterfactual imagination" while speculating on the queer subtext of the quartet. Emre concludes the section with consideration of Ferrante's elusiveness as a literary figure and her choice to remain known only by the words behind which she so often hides. While it is primarily Ferrante devotees who will find this book most intriguing, those interested in alternative modes of critical inquiry should take a look as well. A sharp and lively book for fans and scholars, but it will have limited appeal among general readers.

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February 1, 2020

In book three of pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante's distinguished "Neapolitan Quartet," Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, aspiring young writer Elena mourns her separation from best friend Lila, having imagined them "writing together, being authors together, drawing power from each other because what was ours was inimitably ours." Reading and writing collectively similarly attracted novelist Katherine Hill (The Violet Hour) and academics Chihaya (English, Princeton Univ.), Merve Emre (English, Univ. of Oxford), and Jill Richards (English, women, gender, sexuality studies, Yale Univ.), who, from June to September 2015, together set out to read a book a month from the Quartet, each writing one or two letters per novel. The project transformed how the authors saw themselves as readers and writers, and quickly evolved from a casual experiment into a critical methodology they would later apply to their course syllabi. Months of conversation on and off the page gave shape to the long essays that round out this freshly conceived collection and carefully analyze Ferrante's texts while also exploring the intricacies of female friendship. VERDICT A truly innovative approach to understanding the author-reader connection made all the more compelling for having one of the 20th century's greatest literary works at its core.--Annalisa Pesek, Library Journal

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