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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Amalia had the unpredictability of a splinter. I couldn't impose on her the prison of a single adjective.",
By
This review is from: Troubling Love (Paperback)
This intense psychological novel, recently translated into English, recreates a daughter's efforts to understand her mother following her mother's mysterious death. Delia, an artist of comic strips, receives three strange phone calls from her mother just before her mother disappears on her way from Naples to Rome to visit Delia. When the body of Amalia, Delia's mother, is ultimately discovered floating near a beach, she is nude, except for a piece of designer underwear, not typical for her mother. Though she has never been close to her mother, Delia is understandably curious about the circumstances of her death, and she leaves Rome to investigate her mother's life in Naples.
Author Elena Ferrante, a pen name used by one of Italy's foremost (and most private) contemporary authors, creates haunting mysteries from the lives of ordinary people leading seemingly ordinary lives--the kinds of mysteries which always exist for family members who can never quite get inside the lives and relationships of people they think they know but whose intimate lives they have not shared. Gradually, Delia begins to realize she may be more her mother's daughter than she had realized. Dense with imagery which speaks directly to the reader's own sensibilities about family, this emotional and introspective novel is also full of ambiguities which resonate long after some of the mysteries have been solved.
3.0 out of 5 stars
Like mother like daughter?,
By Annabel Gaskell "gaskella2" (Nr Oxford, UK) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Troubling Love (Paperback)
I found it very hard to engage with this book. This tale of a Delia returning to her home town after her mother's death and discovering her mother had a secret life was interesting, however the author's preoccupation with womens' bodily functions and secretions made it a little too earthily blunt and slightly sordid for me.
The sultry heat of backstreet Naples did come through though, and combined to make an emotionally claustrophobic story that I recognised as being a great debut novel from this secretive Italian writer, but not one that I enjoyed reading.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.8 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews) 5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Amalia had the unpredictability of a splinter. I couldn't impose on her the prison of a single adjective.",
By Mary Whipple - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Troubling Love (Paperback)
This intense psychological novel, recently translated into English, recreates a daughter's efforts to understand her mother following her mother's mysterious death. Delia, an artist of comic strips, receives three strange phone calls from her mother just before her mother disappears on her way from Naples to Rome to visit Delia. When the body of Amalia, Delia's mother, is ultimately discovered floating near a beach, she is nude, except for a piece of designer underwear, not typical for her mother. Though she has never been close to her mother, Delia is understandably curious about the circumstances of her death, and she leaves Rome to investigate her mother's life in Naples.
There she learns from a neighbor that her mother had been seeing someone. An expensive shirt belonging to a man, and a garbage bag containing her mother's well-mended underclothing, are the only clues to Amalia's recent life. A strange telephone caller tells Delia to leave the laundry bag of dirty clothing for him, and he indicates that he has left a suitcase of her mother's things in the apartment, new designer items, unlike anything her mother has ever worn. So begins Delia's quest to discover who her mother really was--and, in the process, who she herself is. As she reconnects with a friend from childhood and learns about her mother's recent relationship, she is forced to remember early events in her relationship with her mother, and to re-examine her feelings about her mother's life from her present adult perspective. Ultimately, she must rethink her own role in affecting the outcome of her mother's life. Author Elena Ferrante, a pen name used by one of Italy's foremost (and most private) contemporary authors, creates haunting mysteries from the lives of ordinary people leading seemingly ordinary lives--the kinds of mysteries which always exist for family members who can never quite get inside the lives and relationships of people they think they know but whose intimate lives they have not shared. Gradually, Delia begins to realize she may be more her mother's daughter than she had realized. Dense with imagery which speaks directly to the reader's own sensibilities about family, this emotional and introspective novel is also full of ambiguities which resonate long after some of the mysteries have been solved. n Mary Whipple 4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The uneasiness of bodies,
By kubanna - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Troubling Love (Paperback)
"For all the days of her life she had reduced the uneasiness of bodies to paper and fabric..." So Delia describes the life of her deceased mother Amalia, a seamstress. Both the uneasiness of bodies and the way we clothe ourselves are recurring themes in this beautifully crafted and expertly translated novel. Elena Ferrante uses these themes to explore the complexities of mother-daughter relationships, conveying the simultaneous longing and revulsion felt by daughters for their mothers. Of her mother, Delia claims, "I was identical to her and yet I suffered because of the incompleteness of that identity." She reacts by running away from Naples and does not return until forced to do so by her mother's mysterious death. The ensuing trip turns into a deep exploration of Delia & Amalia's pasts and each woman's desires.
As a narrator, Delia is at once distant and intensely emotional. This makes her one of the most compelling characters I have found in modern literature. This book was so engrossing that I read it from start to finish in just under two days. I have discovered a new favorite author in Elena Ferrante. 2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Unknowability of Those We Love,
By L. Young "palmtree2000" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Troubling Love (Paperback)
"My mother drowned on the night of May 23rd, my birthday". So begins this first novel written by the reclusive Italian author Elena Ferrante. Delia, the forty-something daughter goes on a personal odyssey into the past to examine her mother, Amalie's life. When found dead Amalie, a modestly living seamstress is discovered naked except for the lingerie she is wearing from an expensive shop, something completely out of character for her. Why? Did she have a lover? Did she commit suicide? Was her drowning an accident? What role did her estranged husband, Delia's father, play? Into the tangled web of an abusive past Ferrante examines truth, guilt, the validity of memory and finally the essential unknowability of those we love. Although this novel has less dramatic thrust than Ferrante's "The Days of Abandonment" she is a master at crafting sentences of extreme beauty and power.
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