Insight into the mind of Ferrante
FRANTUMAGLIA is not a word you will find in an Italian dictionary; it is a word that, so she claims, was used by Elena Ferrante’s mother to describe a sort of mengelmoes as we would say in Afrikaans. Frantumaglia is a collection of interviews with curious journalists (carried out by email), emails to her publisher, and occasional writings; a collection which brings us no closer to finding out who she is, or explaining her work through this “biography”.
The seven novels that Ferrante has published in English since 2005 are so involving that it is almost impossible not to look for the source of their appeal in the storyteller herself. Ferrante, however, writes under a pseudonym and chooses not to share any details of her personal life with the public.The writings in Frantumaglia start with Ferrante’s first letter to her Italian publisher Sandra Ferri. This correspondence is the beginning of the invention or birth of “Elena Ferrante,” the name she invented to counter the side effects of becoming a celebrated novelist.
The underlying thesis of the book promotes the idea that art is more coherent than the artist. Ferrante keeps coming back to the idea that we are all “fickle agglomerations” of bits and pieces and, she thinks, it is better that way.
She celebrates ancient texts because they had “no definite author,” and so they took on “an intense life of their own.”
The writer who has influenced Ferrante most, the Italian novelist Elsa Morante, usually put male characters at the centre of her novels, but Ferrante focuses on female characters. After reading the four Neapolitan novels, I took a break, started reading Frantumaglia and immediately needed to read Troubling Love and to find online snippets of the movie that was made of this book. Part of Frantumaglia consists of correspondence between Ferrante and the director, Mario Morante. This was a fascinating insight into the mind of Ferrante. Ferrante is pleased with the screenplay, and the clips I have watched confirm that the movie catches the atmosphere of the novel.
Frantumaglia allows flashes of understanding that make the novels fit newly into place. Two of its three clearest themes are: one, that female characters must be more than lovely absences or figments of a man’s imagination and, two, that women should feel free to claim the power of gripping genre writing for their own purposes. The third, of course, is the anonymity. The author’s sense that a self is a bundle of fragments is the element that, finally, justifies the terrific speed of narrative on an intellectual level.Gathering associations, the jumble rumbles on to become both “a storehouse of time without the orderliness of history” and the deeply buried conflicts that engender suffering for her heroines.