![]() These questions of neatness and truth rear up at the beginning of In the Margins, a slim book containing four lectures written by Ferrante, but delivered by actors last year. ![]() Who gets to tell whose story? What if the story I’m telling leads nowhere? Is fiction more truthful when seen behind a veil of lies? She has always been fascinated by the way reality is transformed into art. The sense of self-estrangement, the ugly-beautiful imagery, the mood of anguish – these are the constants in Ferrante’s fiction, from her early first-person stories about desperate women whose lives are going to pieces to her Neapolitan Quartet that made Ferrante an international phenomenon – as well as the world’s most famous literary recluse. ![]() Describing herself as “only a tangled knot”, she says: “Nobody, not even the one who at this moment is writing, knows if it contains the right thread for a story or is merely a snarled confusion of suffering, without redemption.” “I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within these lines that are intended to give me a story,” she writes. ![]() A t the beginning of Elena Ferrante’s last novel, The Lying Life of Adults (2020), the narrator recalls a moment of shame from early adolescence that left her feeling permanently untethered. ![]()
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