It seems that I am on a mission to catch up with all of Elena Ferrante books, and even with those she is about to publish this year (more details about this hopefully soon). Using the pretexte of improving my German - my lifetime goal - I am using the audiobooks using the translations from Italian by Karin Krieger, read by the actress Eva Mattes. From the point of view of the language, there is a certain gain in my project. Literarily speaking, not always.
My latest read was Troubling Love/Lästige Liebe, the first book authored by Ferrante, published in 1991. The book includes many of the motives further explored in other books, such as the deceiving world of adults who are literally poisoning the children purity, but also related or not to this, a certain repulsive vision of sex, which I may not fancy at all. The action of the book is set in Naples in the 1960s, with frequent references to the ´dialect´ which is spoken here. It is a Naples sinking in poverty, bad smells and promiscuity, a realm which appears in many other novels by Ferrante set in that timeframe.
The book has a thriller touch which is eventually lost during the various human encounters. Amalia, 60 yo, drowned while on the way to meet her daughter, Delia, a comic strips author. Delia is back in Naples trying to figure out what happened to her mother, how did she spend the last days and hours, why did she died?
There are many psychological elements to this search, too many and overwhelming in my opinion, who are tainting the plot. Delia is going through a transfer of personality, getting into her mother´s clothes - figuratively and in reality, re-imagining an abusive, psychotic kind of relationship with a man from her mother´s past.
The storytelling pace is entincing and has a certain charming appeal, but there are many elements which, for me, are repugnant - not due to puristic standards but because they are gratuitous and do not bring anything knowledgeable to the story - and cheaply psychoanalitic.
Definitely, this book was not for me - at all - but the language of the translation was good and at least the audiobook format maintained a certain literary realm for some of my very mundane every-morning/evening activities.
Rating: 2.5 stars
No comments:
Post a Comment