Frantomalia

Description

Frantomalia is a word that encompasses many feelings, including a state of exhaustion bordering on drowning in a jumble of shattered fragments. It is this state that the author seeks to capture in order to gather fragmented life memories and transform them into a novel.

This book offers us a perfect example of the absolute passion for writing, taking us into Elena Ferrante’s laboratory to glimpse the drawers from which her first three novels and her four-volume *My Brilliant Friend* series (which recently topped the New York Times list of the best novels of the 21st century) emerged.

The author answers many questions from her readers. She discusses why an author should step back and allow the text to forge its own path. She also shares the thoughts and anxieties that arise when her novels are adapted into films. It speaks of the joys, troubles, and anxieties that haunt those who tell a story and then discover its shortcomings.

It speaks of the writer’s need to acquire a narrative identity, and of anonymous writing as a necessity, not a myth. It speaks of her relationship with motherhood, feminism, psychoanalysis, the cities she lived in, and childhood as a repository of thousands of allusions and imaginings. The result is this book, overflowing with characters and events, meant to be read as a novel—a self-portrait imbued with the narrative vitality of a writer whose like is rarely seen.