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A review by marathonreader
In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing by Elena Ferrante
Did not finish book.
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
3.75
"I wanted to circumscribe, inscribe, describe, prescribe, even proscribe, if necessary. I couldn't contain myself, I was going to spill out into the world, into the other, into others, and write about them" - "Aquamarine," p. 41
In "Pain and the Pen," Ferrante addresses the conventions enforced into us by society and convention, and how these physical restraints (i.e. writing in the margins) connects to our broader concept of correctness.
In "Pain and the Pen," Ferrante addresses the conventions enforced into us by society and convention, and how these physical restraints (i.e. writing in the margins) connects to our broader concept of correctness.
"In my longing to write, starting in early adolescence, both the threat of those red lines - my handwriting is now very neat... - and the desire and fear of violating them are probably at work. more generally, I believe that the sense I have of writing - and all the struggles it involves - has to do with the satisfaction of staying beautifully within the margins and, at the same time, with the impression of loss, of waste, because of that success" (p. 21)
She also discusses the intellectual and physical mechanism of writing in terms of this paradox of how you can never capture a moment it occurs in real time. She thinks of a passage by Svevo as she says, "the struggle is due to the fact that the present - the entire present, even that of the 'I' who writes, letter by letter - can't maintain with clarity the thought-vision, which always comes before, is always the past, and therefore tends to be blotted out" (22). This comes up again in "Aquamarine," as a state that she calls the "inner life." This as well introduces the concept of the plural I's - the writer and the characters. Rilke seems to reference this here and there, as well.
In "Aquamarine," as well, she discusses the extent to which writing can encapsulate a subject: "all narratives were inevitably the work of narrators... who by nature, by form, could only be a fragment among fragments of reality" (48). Later, using the examples of Troubling Love and Days of Abandonment and Lost Daughter and her other stories, she argues that we are never given the whole of a character/ narrator. And sometimes that is the point: "Leda carries out an act... that she is unable to give meaning to, either add the beginning of her story or at the end. And I myself, Elena Ferrante, conceived my writing and hers in such a way that in both of us the absolute, concentrated isolation of the narrative discourse would reach a point of no return. We are both simply driven to exhaustion, summarized in Leda's final remark, to her daughters: 'I'm dead, but I'm fine.'" (53).
Of course, the most powerful conversation of the "I" is in her essay "Histories, I." She speaks of the inspiration from which we gather our writing, but also how what we say is in ways an amalgamation - or at least consideration - of those that have come before us (p. 71). She says, "Dealings with the world, yes, at any time they are entirely ours. But the words ... are not. We have to accept the fact act no word is truly ours. We have to give up the idea that writing miraculously releases a voice of our own, a tonality of our own: in my view that is a lazy way of talking about writing. Writing is... getting comfortable with everything that has already been written... Writing is seizing everything that has already been written and gradually learning to spend that enormous fortune... Thus when I talk about my 'I' who writes, I should immediately ad that I'm talking about my 'I' who has read...And I should emphasize that every book read carries within itself a host of other writings that, consciously or inadvertently, I've taken in" (72-73).
Her last essay is "Dante's Rib," which is a homage to how, in spite of all the essays that have come first here, Dante does not fear working within the margins: "In all three canticles I saw the effort of going beyond what he already knew how to imagine and how to do. Sometimes I thought: here not even the most scholarly annotations follow him. I racked my brains and said to myself: he's left behind not only his sense of the beautiful but also ours; we are used to reading and writing too cautiously, we are cowards. Not him, he's seeing if one can make poetry even with the negation of poetry" (100).
She also discusses the intellectual and physical mechanism of writing in terms of this paradox of how you can never capture a moment it occurs in real time. She thinks of a passage by Svevo as she says, "the struggle is due to the fact that the present - the entire present, even that of the 'I' who writes, letter by letter - can't maintain with clarity the thought-vision, which always comes before, is always the past, and therefore tends to be blotted out" (22). This comes up again in "Aquamarine," as a state that she calls the "inner life." This as well introduces the concept of the plural I's - the writer and the characters. Rilke seems to reference this here and there, as well.
In "Aquamarine," as well, she discusses the extent to which writing can encapsulate a subject: "all narratives were inevitably the work of narrators... who by nature, by form, could only be a fragment among fragments of reality" (48). Later, using the examples of Troubling Love and Days of Abandonment and Lost Daughter and her other stories, she argues that we are never given the whole of a character/ narrator. And sometimes that is the point: "Leda carries out an act... that she is unable to give meaning to, either add the beginning of her story or at the end. And I myself, Elena Ferrante, conceived my writing and hers in such a way that in both of us the absolute, concentrated isolation of the narrative discourse would reach a point of no return. We are both simply driven to exhaustion, summarized in Leda's final remark, to her daughters: 'I'm dead, but I'm fine.'" (53).
Of course, the most powerful conversation of the "I" is in her essay "Histories, I." She speaks of the inspiration from which we gather our writing, but also how what we say is in ways an amalgamation - or at least consideration - of those that have come before us (p. 71). She says, "Dealings with the world, yes, at any time they are entirely ours. But the words ... are not. We have to accept the fact act no word is truly ours. We have to give up the idea that writing miraculously releases a voice of our own, a tonality of our own: in my view that is a lazy way of talking about writing. Writing is... getting comfortable with everything that has already been written... Writing is seizing everything that has already been written and gradually learning to spend that enormous fortune... Thus when I talk about my 'I' who writes, I should immediately ad that I'm talking about my 'I' who has read...And I should emphasize that every book read carries within itself a host of other writings that, consciously or inadvertently, I've taken in" (72-73).
Her last essay is "Dante's Rib," which is a homage to how, in spite of all the essays that have come first here, Dante does not fear working within the margins: "In all three canticles I saw the effort of going beyond what he already knew how to imagine and how to do. Sometimes I thought: here not even the most scholarly annotations follow him. I racked my brains and said to myself: he's left behind not only his sense of the beautiful but also ours; we are used to reading and writing too cautiously, we are cowards. Not him, he's seeing if one can make poetry even with the negation of poetry" (100).