Troubling Love (novel)

Last updated
Troubling Love
EditorEuropa Editions
AuthorElena Ferrante
Original titleL'Amore Molesto
TranslatorAnn Goldstein
Publication date
1992
Published in English
2016
ISBN 9781933372167

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.

Contents

The book was nominated for the prestigious Strega Prize, [1] and won the Procida-Isola di Arturo-Elsa Morante Prize. [2]

The book was adapted to the cinema in 1995, becoming the feature film Nasty Love , directed by Mario Martone.

Plot

Delia goes back to Naples, her native city, when her mother dies in strange circumstances. There, she rediscovers hidden corners of her personality and comes to understand her relationship to her mother. The story is entirely narrated in the first person by the protagonist, forced to return to the places of her childhood and to collide again with a reality she had escaped.

Delia's mother, Amalia, was a poor seamstress who had been found dead at a beach, presumed drowned, wearing only a luxury bra. Delia can not understand how her mother ended there, and she tries to reconstruct her mother's life step by step.

Soon Delia decides to devote herself to the analysis of the male figures present in Amalia's life: her brother (and Delia's uncle) Filippo, a now elderly and weak man, with an expansive and outgoing character; her husband (and Delia's father) from whom Amalia had run away more than twenty years earlier, a dull, violent and extremely jealous man; finally Nicola Polledro, known as Caserta, the charming old man who, in the last period, the widow De Riso (a neighbor) used to see coming and going from Amalia's house.

Delia, in her painful process of mourning and reconstruction of the facts, spends a lot of time with her uncle Filippo who, in a confused and unreliable way, helps her to remember some of the cruel impositions and domestic violence that Amalia had been forced to suffer. Delia decides to delve even deeper into this compulsive search for details on the life of her mother, that appears to her to be passionate, intricate and fascinating.

To find out more she decides to look for Caserta, who seems to want to play with her through confused signals, chases and sudden appearances. To get to him, the protagonist decides to track down Antonio Polledro, her childhood friend and Caserta's son, with whom she experiences a brief sexual episode aimed at increasingly obsessively embodying the figure of Amalia and her probable love for Caserta.

With the help of Filippo, Delia remembers that she told her father of Amalia's possible affair with Caserta, and comes to understand that she, at age five, had been confused by seeing the two adults and having been harassed herself by Caserta's father. This connects to her complex feelings for her mother, of fear, jealousy, curiosity and sexual revulsion.

This and many others are the little secrets that emerge from the fierce introspective analysis that Delia undergoes during the story and, thanks to this, it becomes possible for her to accept her faults and elaborate once and for all the love-hate that he kept her tied to her mother like barbed wire.

Main characters

Themes

Relations between women

The novel starts a trend by which Ferrante is known, of portraying women trapped in difficult lives or situations at the limit of sustainability and endurance. This process is repeated in most of Ferrante's works and stories. The author, in fact, in her novels, presents women of similar origins and characteristics, intertwining their lives with the history of the city of Naples, with episodes of violence embedded in their memories, with a harsh language of which many try to break free. [3]

Each female protagonist conceived by Elena Ferrante is forced to confront her own past and present, following a long path of change and rebirth, made possible by strong self-discipline. It is precisely this self-control that leads to the conclusion of the events, in which the main characters arrive at full awareness of themselves and the realization of the ability to face the turmoil of their lives. [3]

Psychological break

A theme that Elena Ferrante studies carefully is that of psychological collapse In particular, what most captures the author's attention is the inner struggle that characterizes the human mind in its attempt to defend itself from the loss of all certainty and to remain firmly attached to reality. Ferrante defines this type of struggle as "battles with death", implying the death of the soul and of female psychological freedom. [3] [4]

The name of the novel comes from a Freudian term, as Ferrante herself has pointed out on her collection of essays Frantumaglia. In his essay "On Female Sexuality", Freud says that for little children the father is “only a troublesome rival” to the child's affection for their mother (In the Italian translation, “un rivale molesto.”) [5]

Reception

The book was well received by the critics, who praised its psychological insight into a mother / daughter relationship. The book won the Procida-Isola di Arturo-Elsa Morante Prize, [2] and was nominated for the Strega Prize. [1]

David Lipsky, writing for The New York Times, said “Halfway through my second reading of Elena Ferrante’s “Troubling Love” — 70 more pages to go in seamy Naples — I tore the book down the middle. It's the first time a novel ever made me get physical, and it was the first good mood I'd been in for weeks." he praised the book's mysterious theme "'I had forgotten nothing,' she explains, gathering evidence, 'but I didn't want to remember'.", and "Ferrante is fascinated by the moments when a personality — like a wire stretched too far from its power source — shorts and corrodes." [6]

For Tiziana de Rogatis, a main theme was the main character's relationship with her mother: "'Amalia had been. I was Amalia'. The last words of Troubling Love acknowledge the magical presence of the mother. With this heartbreaking climax, Ferrante modifies the scope of the family novel, placing at its epicenter a story about mothers that turns mysterious and disquieting." [7]

Bibliography

In Italian

In English

Film adaptation

The book was adapted into the Italian film of the same name, released in the UK as Nasty Love and in the United States as Troubling love.

L'Amore Molesto won 3 David di Donatello Awards for Best Actress, Best Director and Best Supporting Actress and was nominated for 2 for Best Film and Best Producer. It was also nominated for a Palme D'or by the Cannes Film Festival for director Mario Martone. [8]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Procida</span> Comune in Campania, Italy

Procida is one of the Flegrean Islands off the coast of Naples in southern Italy. The island is between Cape Miseno and the island of Ischia. With its tiny satellite island of Vivara, it is a comune of the Metropolitan City of Naples, in the region of Campania.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elsa Morante</span> Italian author

Elsa Morante was an Italian novelist, poet, translator and children's books author. Her novel La storia (History) is included in the Bokklubben World Library List of 100 Best Books of All Time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maria Amalia of Saxony</span> Queen of Spain from 1759 to 1760

Maria Amalia was Queen of Spain from 10 August 1759 until her death in 1760 as the wife of King Charles III. Previously, she had been Queen of Naples and Sicily since marrying Charles on 19 June 1738. She was born a princess of Poland and Saxony, daughter of King Augustus III of Poland and Princess Maria Josepha of Austria. Maria Amalia and Charles had thirteen children, of whom seven survived into adulthood. A popular consort, Maria Amalia oversaw the construction of the Caserta Palace outside Naples as well as various other projects, and she is known for her influence upon the affairs of state.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Enrico Brizzi</span> Italian writer

Enrico Brizzi is an Italian writer. He is best known for his debut novel Jack Frusciante Has Left the Band, which is so far the only one translated into English. It also inspired the same name Italian movie in 1996.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Domenico Starnone</span> Italian writer, screenwriter and journalist

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sandro Veronesi (writer)</span> Italian novelist, journalist, and essayist (born 1959)

Sandro Veronesi is an Italian novelist, essayist, and journalist. After earning a degree in architecture at the University of Florence, he opted for a writing career in his mid to late twenties. Veronesi published his first book at the age of 25, a collection of poetry that has remained his only venture into verse writing. He has since published five novels, three books of essays, one theatrical piece, numerous introductions to novels and collections of essays, interviews, screenplays, and television programs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roberto Pazzi</span> Italian novelist and poet (1946–2023)

Roberto Pazzi was an Italian novelist and poet. His works have been translated into twenty-six languages. He was widely recognized in Italian literary circles for his poetry and novels. His Debut novel, Cercando l'Imperatore in 1985, received a number of international awards and started a prolific career of historical and contemporary novels.

Arturo's Island is a novel by Italian author Elsa Morante. Published in 1957, it won the Premio Strega.

Giorgio van Straten is an Italian writer and manager of arts organizations. His first novel Generazione was published in 1987. In 2000 he won four literary prizes for Il mio nome a memoria, published in English as My Name, A Living Memory (2003), the story of his Jewish-Dutch family from 1811 to our days. That same year he was awarded the Grand Official Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.

<i>Nasty Love</i> 1995 film

Nasty Love is a 1995 Italian thriller film directed by Mario Martone. It was entered into the 1995 Cannes Film Festival. It is based on the novel of the same name, by Elena Ferrante. The film was shot mainly in Naples, Italy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Valeria Parrella</span> Italian author, playwright and activist

Valeria Parrella is an Italian author, playwright and activist.

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.

<i>Arturos Island</i> (film) 1962 film

L'isola di Arturo is a 1962 Italian drama film directed by Damiano Damiani. It is based on the novel with the same name written by Elsa Morante. The film won the Golden Shell at the San Sebastián International Film Festival.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anna Maria Ortese</span> Italian author (1914–1998)

Anna Maria Ortese was an Italian author of novels, short stories, poetry, and travel writing. Born in Rome, she grew up between southern Italy and Tripoli, with her formal education ending at age thirteen. Her first book, Angelici dolori, was issued in 1937. In 1953 her third collection, Il mare non bagna Napoli, won the coveted Viareggio Prize; thereafter, Ortese's stories, novels, and journalism received many of the most distinguished Italian literary awards, including the Strega and the Fiuggi. Although she lived for many years in Naples following the Second World War, she also resided in Milan, in Rome, and for most of the last twenty years of her life in Rapallo. L'iguana, Ortese’s best-known work in English translation, was published in 1987 as The Iguana by the American literary press McPherson & Company. As of 2023, what she considered as her most important work, the novel Il porto di Toledo (1975), had not been translated into English yet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Milena Agus</span> Italian author from Sardinia

Milena Agus is an Italian author from Sardinia. She is one of the leading novelists in the so-called Sardinian Literary Spring which began in the 1980s and which includes other international names such as Michela Murgia.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Angelo Cannavacciuolo</span>

Angelo Cannavacciuolo is an Italian writer and director.

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.

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.

References

  1. 1 2 "Autori finalisti – Premio Strega 2022". premiostrega.it. Retrieved 2023-02-28.
  2. 1 2 "Albo vincitori - Procida Isola di Arturo, ELSA MORANTE". 2019-05-09. Archived from the original on 2019-05-09. Retrieved 2023-02-28.
  3. 1 2 3 ALSOP, ELIZABETH (2014). "Femmes Fatales: "La fascinazione di morte" in Elena Ferrante's "L'amore molesto" and "I giorni dell'abbandono"". Italica. 91 (3): 466–485. ISSN   0021-3020. JSTOR   24368908.
  4. "The Quietus | Features | Tome on the Range | 25 Years of Troubling Love: Ferrante's Women & the Fight for Privacy".
  5. Ferrante, Elena. Frantumaglia. Europa Editions USA, 2017: page 161.
  6. Lipsky, David (2006-10-01). "Return to Naples". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2023-02-28.
  7. Rogatis, De Tiziana, and Will Schutt. Elena Ferrante's Key Words. Europa Editions, 2019.
  8. "L'AMORE MOLESTO - Festival de Cannes". www.festival-cannes.com. Retrieved 2023-02-28.