Troubling Love: A Novel

I have a deep and abiding love for Elena Ferrante. The first book I read by her was My Brilliant Friend and I went on to read the next two books in The Neapolitan Novels the same day. Her writing is controlled but also passionate, frightening. Her characters have recklessness to them that I really enjoy. I picked up Troubling Love because I was reading Frantumaglia (which I highly, highly recommend, it's the best nonfiction book I read this year) and I realized that I wanted to read all her novels before I continued to read it because it consists of interviews about her various books. Troubling Love, as I understand, was Ferrante's first book. She says in Frantumaglia that she was writing for many years before she wrote it but this was the first story that she felt really had literary truth, could stand on its own two feet. I find Troubling Love to be a kind of perplexing and unsatisfying book. I would probably say that most her other books are strictly better, but this book does have the kind of raw power that characterizes all her writing, and Delia's relationship with her mother has the trademark complexity that defines all of female relationships Ferrante depicts. I love the Naples that she brings to life in every novel. I read a New York Times review of Troubling Love in which the author describes ripping the book down the middle and says Ferrante will "recognize my compliment since she’s clearly an idolizer of the unchecked urge, the gut response." The unchecked urge: that's Ferrante.

ferrante is one of the most gifted living writers on the planet, but this book, although beautifully written, was pretty tedious. even if you've already read it, your time will be better spent re-reading My Brilliant Friend.

The most desperate piece of writing that I have ever read. So full of crowded thoughts, the protagonist is almost a full live creation, smiling, crying, thinking, remembering, but not quite real. I have read 5 of Elena's books, so I understand her characters and the human condition of growing up in Naples.

You ever encounter an author and recognize immediately you have to read everything they've written? Astounding storytelling, riveting page-turning drama and suspense, unforgettable fascinating characters, narration and atmosphere. Somewhere between Gillian Flynn, James Cain or Jim Thompson, Kafka or Camus, but entirely her own disturbing creature, it's no wonder Elena Ferrante has spawned some of the strongest film and television adaptations of the decade in recent years, each of which is highly worth familiarizing yourself with too if you have not had the pleasure. So looking forward to immersing myself in impressive body of work, aren't many authors working today who can do anything approaching what is accomplished between these covers. Highly recommend acquainting yourself with Ferrante's unique style and jarring scenarios, haunting casts of characters.

Having devoured the Neapolitan novels and marveled at Ferrante's ability to make us care about the vicissitudes of life in The Neighborhood and the psyches of scrappy, unlikable characters, I was baffled by doting(?)/dotty(?)/self-loathing daughter Delia in Troubling Love, which had me at hello, sagged in the middle and lost me in the end. So much depends on the motif of the stained blue dress, a la Monica. Why? In the end, I don't really care. I felt sympathy for Amalia, I wanted to solve her case, but I didn't like her or any other character. This slender book, published in 1999, preceded the Neapolitan novels. If you haven't read Ferrante's four recent books, don't start with Troubling Love. The Neapolitan novels are master class; this one reads more like a freewrite by a woman in crisis.

This novel never gripped me, as all previous Ferrante novels have from the very outset.Wouldn’t really recommend. Sort of flat. Lacked the usual vivid voice.

Many reviewers have approached this novel as a peculiarly intense story about a daughter mother relationship, a psychological, sexual introspection of a woman approaching age, even a mystery novel(see Eurocrime.co.uk/reviews). Yes it is all this and more. The adjective most often applied to this novel is intense. It is that and more. The attention to detail is unnerving and I dare say that the average or most male readers will experience for the first time those female attitudes and experiences that at time we males ignore, and that is my point.Ms. Ferrante has written a novel that transcends ersatz dime store female literature and presents a moving picture of universal interest. Great literature is not great simply because a woman wrote well or not great because women by definition cannot or should not write (remember George Eliot).But let me not belabor the obvious. I believe that two unremarked aspects of this novel are the brutally realistic picture of life in Naples (one need only read Ferrante's letter to the New York Times, available from Europa Editions) and the clever exposition of her male characters and their reliance upon women to define their existence. These qualities are what make it great and enduring.

Having read, and absolutely loved, the first three books of Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels (NNs) I was slightly dissapointed in this book. It read like a short story that has been stretched out. The characters, if not the same, were very similar to those we grew to love or dislike in the NNs except, not as well developed. The context, again, was very similar as were the issues covered. A slightly surrealist, but difficult to fathom, twist was the only point of difference.

I have very mixed feelings about this book. Some scenes are so compellingly vivid and beautifully written the images just wouldn't leave my mind. The unexpected and unexplained loss of one's mother is enough to transform the world into something hostile and unfamiliar. Through the eyes of grief everything seems unreal, unstable and ugly, and this is how the protagonist experiences Naples and the people she encounters. A lot of very unpleasant details and sensory descriptions seemed designed primarily to evoke disgust. Of course, I recognise that Ferrante also wants to explore and expose the terrible vulnerabilty of women in a violent, patriarchal society, but I found this aspect overdone and slightly neurotic. The male characters are all horrific caricatures, ugly, violent and completely lacking in humanity. But the mother - who displays astonishing resilience despite her awful life story - is not terribly interesting or sympathetic. In the end perhaps she amounts to not much more than the old blue suit left on a hanger, and some sad pieces of ragged underwear. Since our protagonist is not very likeable either, I sometimes felt I was being dragged along to places I didn't want to go, and I just wanted it all to be over.

In this short, pacy novel of often overpowering intensity, “Troubling love” refers to the narrator Delia’s ambiguous feelings for her mother Amalia, a mixture of love and hate, brought to a head by her death by drowning, an apparent act of suicide. Delia is not only driven to find out how her mother died but also to make sense of the chain of confused, even false memories which have blighted her life. Was Amalia the innocent victim of violent abuse at the hands of a jealous husband, in a Naples where casual sexual harassment seems to be the norm, or was she responsible for provoking him with her flirtatious manner and possible adultery with his former business partner Caserta?Apart from her unlikely career drawing comic strips, and the fact that, approaching forty, she seems to be unattached and childless, we learn little about Delia’s adult life, but she appears to be mentally unstable. Apparently traumatised by her upbringing, did some childish action on her part make matters worse and how reliable a witness is she now?Part of the magnetic pull of the writing stems from the way in which the facts, which initially seem bizarre or dreamlike, are revealed or made clear, like the pieces of a jigsaw fitting into place. A strong sense of Naples is created: the heat, furious commotion, squalor, decay, and sea like a “violet paste”. The book has been made into a film, and I found it much easier to read once I grasped the cinematic quality of many of scenes, with their emphasis on visual detail through which deeper meaning may become apparent. For instance in a sustained incident in which various characters pursue each other through the streets of Naples and onto a funicular, there is a purely visual image of someone “as if… skating on the metallic grey of the pavement, a massive yet agile figure against the scaffold of yellow painted iron bars at the entrance to Piazza Vanvitelli”. Alighting at the “dimly lit concrete bunker” of Chiaia Station, Delia imagines or perhaps partly remembers how it was nearly forty years ago, with her mother waiting there, mesmerised by three figures advertising clothes, symbolising the freedom of another world, and wondering how she and her daughter could escape into it.Particularly for a first novel, this is original and brilliant, but bleak. It also repelled me in its gratuitous focus on the sordid side of life: too much about the mess of menstruation, masturbation and sexual beatings. What lies behind the author’s dedication of this novel “for my mother”? Is it a mark of admiration or a reproach? A reviewer’s humorous comment, “My money is on Elena Ferrante being male, with slightly perverted sexual tastes” also strikes a chord. The brutal passion and frankness of the writing may illustrate the cultural difference between Italian and British literary fiction.This compulsive read assaulted my senses, and left me feeling tainted.

With such a fantastic history and reputation I was keen to read the story, but I personally found it confusing as the story jumped from reality to imagined recollections, and eventually I came to the conclusion that the two main characters, mother and daughter, were in fact the same person.Loved the writing but much more difficult to approach than ‘My Brilliant Friend’

Delia explores the death of her mother Amalia. She learns much about the past - her own as a five year old and her mother's and her father's and the man who may (or may not) have been her lover's. She also spends an unhappy day in Naples as her boundaries give way as she remembers the past and becomes more and more identified with her mother.This is not quite the equal of the Neapolitan novels but is a powerful work in its own right. In Frantumaglia, Ferrante describes how she likes to start with an educated and self-aware viewpoint on the world and then allows this outlook to be subverted by emotional pressures breaking through under the impact of events. This novel certainly fits that pattern.

I loved the Neapolitan novels but could not make any sense of this one. It was boring and tiring. I really did not understand what was going on. Was she imagining everything? I finished it because I don’t like to stop a book in the middle of it and, since it was short, I decided to go on.