In the Margins On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing
Reviews
oh to be sitting in a lecture room and listening to elena ferrante
I liked pain and pen the most of her essays. However I really didn’t like the whole Dante’s rib thing; it made my eyes glaze over.
an incredibly valuable insight into writing and the way other works influence our own work, especially when it comes to female authorship. i was generally interested in reading 'my brilliant friend' but after finishing 'in the margins', it has become an imperative. i am really interested in further exploring the ideas that ferrante talks about in the lectures - the fight between the author and the language, the position of the female author in literature and also the distinction between an author and an average but arduous writer. i am curious how they will shape me, now that i am conscious of them.
"I believe that the pure and simple joining of the female 'I' to History changes History. The History of the first line, the one that hangs the witch's work on the gallows-note, something important has happened-is not, can no longer be, the History of the second, the one in which we find, around us, all the witchcraft we need."
Highlights
For me writing is that: not an elegant, studied gesture but a convulsive act.
Over time, writing has come to mean giving shape to a permanent balancing and unbalancing of myself, arranging fragments in a frame and waiting to mix them up. Thus the novel of love begins to satisfy me when it becomes the novel of being out of love. The mystery begins to absorb me when I know that no one will find out who the murderer is. The bildungsroman seems to me on the right track when it’s clear that no one will be built. 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 the opposite.