Book #131 |
Book: In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing | Author: Elena Ferrante | |
| Source: Library loan Format: Large print |
Pages: 160 | Duration: 12/25/25 – 12/25/25 (1 day) | |
| Rating: ★★★☆☆ | Genres: nonfiction, essays, writing, books about books, memoir, Italian Literature, feminism | ||
| 📕10-word summary: Pandemic-aborted lectures about Ferrante’s writing process turned into a book. 🖌6-word review: Very academic and at times esoteric. |
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| 💭A memorable quote: “Beautiful writing becomes beautiful when it loses its harmony and has the desperate power of the ugly. And characters? I feel they are false when they exhibit clear coherence and I become passionate about them when they say one thing and do another.” | |||
| 🎓Some new-to-me words: camorrist, canticle, calque | |||
| Description:* In 2020, Claire Luchette in O, The Oprah Magazine described the beloved Italian novelist Elena Ferrante as “an oracle among authors.” Here, in these 4 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.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||
| Thoughts: I’ve read 2 books by Elena Ferrante — The Days of Abandonment in 2022 and The Lost Daughter in 2025 — and both books have brutally honest female protagonists whose first-person accounts “take you down” with them. It’s quite remarkable writing, which is what made me interested in reading about her writing process. I gave this book only 3 stars solely due to the “may or may not recommend” part of that rating. I doubt this book would be interesting to non-writers, and it’s quite an academic endeavor, which is also a turn-off for a lot of people. | |||
See the rest of the books I’ve read in 2025 and previous years: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019.
