Troubling Love

“Childhood is a tissue of lies that endure in the past tense: at least, mine was like that” Troubling Love is the first novel by Italian author, Elena Ferrante. The drowning death of her sixty-three year old mother, Amalia, sends Rome cartoonist, Delia back to her hometown of Naples for the funeral. The circumstances of Amalia’s death were a little strange: overdue for her monthly visit to Delia, she was found on the beach that was their childhood holiday destination, dressed only in an expensive bra. Suicide is assumed. Back in the town she fled years ago, the surroundings, events and people she encounters force Delia to re-examine her childhood and adolescence, and reassess her memories of that time. Ferrante is described as one of the great novelists of our time, and she certainly has a talent for rendering powerful images and ideas (“Amalia had the unpredictability of a splinter, I couldn’t impose on her the prison of a single adjective”), but one does not read this author for pleasure. In this, her first novel under this pseudonym, her characters are wholly unappealing: a flirtatious mother who takes her young daughter along to her assignations; a violent, jealous and insecure husband and father; an arrogant lover; an old man with a soiled underwear fetish. Their dialogue is occasionally difficult to follow, the intended meaning and significance of their words obscure. Ferrante sets her story in a male-dominated culture, where sexual harassment is commonplace, verbal abuse is the norm (“In fact, they had produced in unison a tumult of insults in dialect, a long list of words ending in consonants, as if the final vowel had been thrown into an abyss and the rest of the word were whining mutely in displeasure”), and domestic violence is routine. Readers may well wonder just how reliable Delia is as a narrator: Was she really molested at age five by the grandfather of her playmate? Was Amalia really an adultress? Delia is difficult to identify with: she provides bizarre intimate details of her life, and the reasons for some of her actions, incomprehensible: “…I was grateful for the small dose of humiliation and pain he had inflicted on me”. Sometimes her thoughts are quite convoluted: “Maybe I couldn’t tolerate that the most secret part of myself used that solidarity to give weight to a hypothesis cultivated with equal secrecy: that my mother bore inscribed in her body a natural guilt, independent of her will and of what she really did, and yet readily appearing as needed in every gesture, in every breath”. Dark and powerful. 2.5 stars