 | |
| Author | Elena Ferrante |
|---|---|
| Original title | La Frantumaglia |
| Translator | Ann Goldstein |
Publication date | 2003 |
Published in English | 2016 |
| Pages | 400 |
| ISBN | 9781609452926 |
Frantumaglia is a non-fiction book written by Italian author Elena Ferrante. The book reflects on her writing process over 20 years and has been republished to reflect her experiences writing the Neapolitan Novels .
Frantumaglia contains 20 years of letters to her publishers, interviews and essays written by Italian writer Elena Ferrante. In them, she opens up about her choice to be anonymous, claiming that "books, once written, have no use for an author", [1] about her writing process, and about her influences.
The title of the book is derived from an expression used by Ferrante's mother, which means a “jumble of fragments,”, that jumped around and destroyed her, and was used to express “a malaise that could not be defined otherwise and that hinted at a crowded, heterogeneous mix of things in her head, like rubbles floating on a brain’s muddy waters”. [2] As the critic has put it "Ferrante keeps coming back to the idea that we are all “fickle agglomerations” of bits and pieces." [3]
The book became especially popular for the possibility of knowing more about the mysterious writer, who uses only a pseudonym and who has never revealed her identity, in spite of decades of speculation. Ferrante writes a lot about how the writing process is different for women, naming the writers who have inspired her: Elsa Morante, Madame de Lafayette, Alice Munro, Clarice Lispector, Shulamith Firestone, and Luce Irigaray, among others.
The book was originally published after the two first novels written by Ferrante, 1991's Troubling Love and 2002's The Days of Abandonment . The book was later expanded to include interviews relating to 2006's The Lost Daughter, and the Neapolitan Series , written between 2011 and 2016.
The book was well received by the critic, which praised Ferrante's ability to guide the reader through her writing process. Victor Zarour Zarzar has claimed that "Frantumaglia might well be her most fascinating text: it is both fiction incarnate and a work of self-exegesis." [1]
They have also praised how Ferrante can expose the mechanism behind her beloved characters: "Heroines who observe themselves vigilantly, though at times they break down and can’t; mothers; daughters and their troublesome porous, ever changing bodies; children; female friends and the vagaries of love – these are Ferrante’s most compelling subjects." [4]
The book was originally published in Italian in 2003, and that original edition was followed by two expanded versions, in 2007 and in 2015. The 2015 volume was the first one to be published in English in 2016. [5]
Hélène Elizabeth Louise Amélie Paula Dolores Poniatowska Amor, known professionally as Elena Poniatowska, is a French-born Mexican journalist and author, specializing in works on social and political issues focused on those considered to be disenfranchised especially women and the poor. She was born in Paris to upper-class parents, including her mother whose family fled Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. She left France for Mexico when she was ten to escape the Second World War. When she was eighteen and without a university education, she began writing for the newspaper Excélsior, doing interviews and society columns. Despite the lack of opportunity for women from the 1950s to the 1970s, she wrote about social and political issues in newspapers, books in both fiction and nonfiction form. Her best known work is La noche de Tlatelolco about the repression of the 1968 student protests in Mexico City. Due to her left wing views, she has been nicknamed "the Red Princess". She is considered to be "Mexico's grande dame of letters" and is still an active writer.
Ann Maxwell, also known as A.E. Maxwell and Elizabeth Lowell, is an American writer. She has individually, and with co-author and husband Evan, written more than 50 novels and one non-fiction book. Her novels range from science fiction to historical fiction, and from romance to mystery to suspense.
Domenico Starnone is an Italian writer, screenwriter, and journalist. He is a prolific book author, having penned at least 22 works since 1987, at least four of which have been translated from Italian into English, including Prima esecuzione and Confidenza. His novel Via Gemito won the Premio Strega in 2001, and movies by Gabriele Salvatores, Riccardo Milani, and Daniele Luchetti have been based on Starnone books.
Elena Ferrante is a pseudonymous Italian novelist. Ferrante's books, originally published in Italian, have been translated into many languages. Her four-book series of Neapolitan Novels are her most widely known works.
Europa Editions is an independent trade publisher based in New York. The company was founded in 2005 by the owners of the Italian press Edizioni E/O and specializes in literary fiction, mysteries, and narrative non-fiction.
The Neapolitan Novels, also known as the Neapolitan Quartet, are a four-part series of fiction by the pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante, published originally by Edizioni e/o, translated into English by Ann Goldstein and published by Europa Editions. The English-language titles of the novels are My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014), and The Story of the Lost Child (2015). In the original Italian edition, the whole series bears the title of the first novel L'amica geniale. The series has been characterized as a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story. In an interview in Harper's Magazine, Elena Ferrante has stated that she considers the four books to be "a single novel" published serially for reasons of length and duration. The series has sold over 10 million copies in 40 countries.
Ann Goldstein is an American editor and translator from the Italian language. She is best known for her translations of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet. She was the panel chair for translated fiction at the US National Book Award in 2022. She was awarded the PEN Renato Poggioli prize in 1994 and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2008.
The Days of Abandonment is a 2002 Italian novel by Elena Ferrante first published in English in 2005, translated by Ann Goldstein and published by Europa Editions. The novel tells the story of an Italian woman living in Turin whose husband abruptly leaves her after fifteen years together.
Merve Emre is a Turkish-American author, academic, and literary critic. She is the author of nonfiction books Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (2017) and The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing (2018), and has published essays and articles in The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and other publications.
The Lying Life of Adults is a 2019 novel by Elena Ferrante. It was adapted into a television series of the same name by Edoardo De Angelis in 2023.
Anita Raja is an Italian translator and writer who has translated many literary works from German to Italian, including those of Christa Wolf, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Bertolt Brecht, and many others. Raja has been suggested as a possible candidate for the Italian author writing under the pen name Elena Ferrante. Since 2016, journalistic investigations and scholarly work analysing financial records and textual similarities have led to reports that the books published under the Ferrante name are the work of either Raja, Domenico Starnone, or both. Starnone has strenuously denied being the author in the press and in his books, arguing that any similarities between his writing and Ferrante's are due to commonalities in subject matter and context.
The Lying Life of Adults is an Italian and Neapolitan-language coming-of-age drama television series created by Edoardo De Angelis, based on the 2019 novel of the same name by Elena Ferrante. It was released internationally by Netflix on 4 January 2023.
The Book of Goose is a 2022 novel written by Yiyun Li. The novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing is a book of essays published in 2021 by Italian writer Elena Ferrante.
Incidental Inventions is a non-fiction book published by writer Elena Ferrante in 2019. The book contains the columns published by the author in English newspaper The Guardian, and translated by Ann Goldstein.
The Beach at Night is a children's novel written by Italian writer Elena Ferrante.
The Lost Daughter is a novel published by writer Elena Ferrante in 2006, in Italian, and translated to English by Ann Goldstein in 2008.
Troubling Love is the first novel published by Italian writer Elena Ferrante. It was originally published in 1992, but only translated to English, by Ann Goldstein, in 2006, following the critical success of Ferrante's following novel, The Days of Abandonment.
The Story of a New Name is a 2012 novel written by Italian author Elena Ferrante. It is the second volume in her four-book series known as the Neapolitan Novels, being preceded by My Brilliant Friend, and succeeded by Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay and The Story of the Lost Child. It was translated to English by Ann Goldstein in 2013.
The Story of the Lost Child is a 2014 novel written by Italian author Elena Ferrante. It is the fourth and final installment of her Neapolitan Novels, preceded by My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name, and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. It was translated to English by Ann Goldstein in 2015.