Disturbing Love

Description

My mother drowned on the night of May 23rd, my birthday.

Elena Ferrante opens her narrative with this harsh, shocking phrase, reminiscent of the opening lines of Kafka’s *The Metamorphosis* and Camus’s *The Stranger*. The protagonist then delves into an investigative search to uncover the causes of this death.

However, we never lose sight of the central theme: the mother-daughter relationship, the daughter’s possession of her mother, and the mother’s extension into her daughter’s body. “Disturbing love” is the woman’s love for her mother, which the author describes in her book *Frantomaglia* as “an intimate, carnal love, mingled with a carnal aversion.” It is sometimes manifested in the choice of clothing, as it becomes the vessel that will contain this dual existence. It sometimes clashes with the daughter’s relationship with her father, who competes with her for her mother’s love—the “troubling rival” in the Freudian sense.

This novel is the story of a woman’s disappearance and a woman’s search for another woman’s trace. Anyone who has read “My Brilliant Friend” with great enthusiasm will undoubtedly find the roots of the quartet here and sense the beginnings of “marginal dissolution.”

“The Disturbing Love” is the debut novel by the author of the pseudonym.