Now that the identity of Elena Ferrante is no longer one of the greatest (cultural) mysteries of our time and it is known that the translator Anita Raja hides behind her pseudonym, the author seems willing to leave hermeticism behind and open up a little more. to your readers. Coinciding with the theatrical release of the adaptation of his novel the dark daughterhis latest book is published in Spain, in which Italian opens up about her love of reading and writing.
It was October 1928 when a mature Virginia Woolf was invited to give a series of talks on women and the novel at Cambridge University. It was there that she was faced with the famous question: “What do women need to write good novels?a response that would end up giving rise to a classic of feminist literature and that, for better or worse, is still valid almost a century later.
In the same way, in the margins, compared by content and form with a room of your ownwas born almost a hundred years after the master classes given by Elena Ferrante, invited by the Umberto Eco Chair, at the University of Bologna.
In them, he takes a historical and personal journey through Elena Ferrante’s inspiration and vocation as a writer. In her pages, she intertwines readings and reflections with her own work and life, about which for the first time he confesses in a new intimacy with his readers. Also, reveal his advice on character creation and plot.
From Shakespeare to Gertrude Stein, through the works of Diderot, Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf, and culminating in Dante and his Beatrice, Ferrante explores the wonder of discovering reading and writing from childhood. The memories of the first written pages, their smells and places, and then the great discoveries, from the canonical names of universal literature even the authors who have illuminated it.
In short, a book about the pleasure of reading and writingwhich has just arrived in Spanish bookstores thanks to Lumen, a publishing house that today owns the rights to his work in our country, and which aims to become the generational successor to Woolf’s classic.
In the margins: On the pleasure of reading and writing (Essay)
Photos | Lumen