The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism

Literature Now

by Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill

Like few other works of contemporary literature, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels found an audience of passionate and engaged readers around the world. Inspired by Ferrante’s intense depiction of female friendship and women’s intellectual lives, four critics embarked upon a project that was both work and to create a series of epistolary readings of the Neapolitan Quartet that also develops new ways of reading and thinking together.

In a series of intertwined, original, and daring readings of Ferrante’s work and her fictional world, Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Juno Jill Richards strike a tone at once critical and personal, achieving a way of talking about literature that falls between the seminar and the book club. Their letters make visible the slow, fractured, and creative accretion of ideas that underwrites all literary criticism and also illuminate the authors’ lives outside the academy. The Ferrante Letters offers an improvisational, collaborative, and cumulative model for reading and writing with others, proposing a new method the authors call collective criticism. A book for fans of Ferrante and for literary scholars seeking fresh modes of intellectual exchange, The Ferrante Letters offers incisive criticism, insouciant riffs, and the pleasure of giving oneself over to an extended conversation about fiction with friends.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Essays, Criticism, Books About Books, Writing, Italy

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 7, 2020

About the author

Sarah Chihaya is a book critic, essayist, and editor. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, and The Yale Review, among other places, and she is the co-author of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism. She has taught at Princeton University, New York University, and UC Berkeley. She is currently a contributing editor at Los Angeles Review of Books and lives in Brooklyn.

Reviews

[Story · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet was one of the most intense literary experiences I've enjoyed as an adult; her books led to much deep and interesting conversation amongst the women with whom I shared the books.

"The Ferrante Letters" helped me revisit the pleasure and interest I found in the novels. The authors combined literary criticism with the kind of book talk one might expect to find in a really good book group.

I particularly enjoyed the letters section of the book though the critical essays were also interesting and illuminated several ideas and themes I hadn't previously considered.

Recommended for the serious Ferrante fan and for students wanting to understand the books on a deeper level.

[Adreeta Chakraborty · Rating 5 out of 5]

a joy, a thrill, a marvel, a dream!!!!! time to read the neapolitan novels again, it's been long enough.

[B. H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most interesting aspects of Ferrante's work is the amount of academic engagement it has engendered. I can't quite think of another author who - less than a decade following the publication in English of her career-defining work - would go on to become the subject of not one, but several books and at this point hundreds of academic articles that go beyond mere book reviews.

"The Ferrante Letters" is part of the literature coming out of the nascent academic sub-genre we might even be tempted to call Ferrante studies. As a book, it epitomizes the interdisciplinary and personal flair that these academic responses to Ferrante can take. "The Ferrante Letters" began as an online project, when four friends, all tenured professors at various academic institutions, spent one summer reading the Neapolitan Novels together and sending letters to each other with their thoughts. It is a boundary-breaking book, as we see the four authors pick up on Ferrante's literary references, do some illuminating and detailed close readings of the text, and perhaps more entertainingly see how the lives of Ferrante's characters map into the authors' own lives, past and present.

Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards know what they're doing. Their letters are erudite, full of intertextual analysis, but also replete with personal anecdotes and musings that make the book approachable, a bit like talking to a friend about your favorite author. As a person who has been there, it is also fascinating to see how other women respond to particular chapters and exchanges, how Ferrante, writing about Italy in the 50s and 60s, still manages to feel extremely personal. It's that sort of magic that I think we keep seeking after the first time a book makes us feel like we've just emerged from a very powerful, and life-changing, spell. And "The Ferrante Letters" is precisely this: four friends on a thrilling literary treasure hunt, trying to discover the source of Ferrante's magic through words.

[Salma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dear Florence,

I started reading this book when you told me you started My Brilliant Friend. I wanted to read along with you, but you know I had just reread the quartet for my paper last semester, so this, to me, reading about women writing about the Neapolitan quartet, was the next proximate alternative. Funnily enough, sometimes, when the authors would quote excerpts from any of the four novels, I felt that I had been reading them for the first time. Occasionally, I’m embarrassed to say, I wouldn’t even recognize the excerpt, couldn’t place it in its chronological spot. Hopefully, this is not because I am an inattentive reader, at least I really want to believe this after a reread…

This book, the authors insist, is not a project of collaboration but one of collectivism, and their singly-authored letters and essays prove as much. Collaboration, they write in the introduction (the only section collaboratively written), felt more constrictive and overwrought with a stagnating paranoia. This experiment in collective criticism maintains the plurality of their ideas, delineating where they independently had mutual ones, without stifling unique progressions or means of getting at these ideas. This method also allows the unique arguments, that only one of the authors had had, to be committed to the page, rather than being swept away, compromised, in a depressing majority of a reinforced similarity.

The question of collaboration in the Neapolitan quartet itself is also very important. Elena wrote the text we are reading herself. But despite this single authorship, Lila infiltrates Elena’s text anyway. Near the end of the fourth book, Elena admits that this long text is her imagination of what Lila would write about their story (if she were ever to do so), but Lila doesn’t (as far as we know), so Elena settles on fantasizing that Lila would permeate the text somehow. And of course, she does. Inevitable is the tension between Lila’s authorial absence and a text saturated with her influence, her verbal tics, her cadence, her diction, her inflections. Elena writes that she would have been eager to give Lila’s text proper form but that she would have ended up rewriting it because, despite Lila’s intellect, she has an “inadequate basic education” and so Lila’s writing, Elena anticipated, would be a “disorderly accumulation” of events.

The void, the infatuation, the paranoia induced by the desired, phantom text authored by Lila, provokes Elena to fashion the periphrastic structure of Lila’s writing in her story (questionable syntax, weird verbal intersections, lists without any semblance of parallelism, run-ons that go on for half a page, parenthesis, comma, clause, comma, clause, comma, clause, parenthesis, use a fucking full stop). This can be the textual negative of a fantasized text staged to appear (to a degree) untouched by Elena’s corrective (also, honestly, presumptuous) impulse. There’s a tragic parody here of a more conscious collaboration between the two of them. At the very end of the quartet, Elena writes that “Lila is not in these words,” but Elena is a liar. This cold remark reads like a childish, spiteful bait to summon Lila, and I won’t spoil anything for you, but I will say that (in a way, if you will humour it) it works. I also thought momentarily that this collapsed, untamed jumble is Lila’s character, her defiance, writhing in the sentence itself, but I can defend this less because it’s easier to theorize about Elena’s actions than Lila’s.

The topic of collectivism comes up again in one of Jill Richards’ letters, which she had written at a week-long conference. She starts the letter with a story of her borrowing a yellow legal pad, forgetting to return it, seeing how it has been repurposed as a colouring book, (accidentally) as a towel of sorts, and a pocket for a tax calculation sheet, and finally as a place to sketch out the bones for the letter we are now reading. The legal pad becomes a site of collective living, intersections in a single communal place. The quartet too, Jill writes, chronicles intersections of intimacy and violence between different characters who move on the same (spatio-temporal) page, with different purposes. But also Elena’s retrospective recalling and “reading” of Lila’s notebooks to synthesize the text we are reading, is a way of activating an anecdotal, conversational reincarnation of events without the logistical inconvenience of spatial and temporal restrictions.

A version of this idea is echoed again in the last guest letter in the appendix, where Amy Schiller writes that the last two books increasingly contain a story that exists alongside (or undercuts) Elena's authorship through the emergence of narrative voices that reminisce on the formative moments she’d established in the first half. The retellings or responses by different characters of the events sometimes undermine and other times corroborate Elena’s initial iteration. This Schiller refers to as “the erosion of Elena’s narrative authority” as characters flesh out the narrative sequence and modify (by way of differently remembering) previous events. But I think that if there is any such erosion of Elena’s authorship, it is one that she, herself, has authorized—to perform a relinquishing of control, of allowing narrative elasticity, which all makes her seem more reliable.

One of the things that came up in these letters is the inclination to pick one of them as your favourite, and I must know yours at different points in the series. Jill Richards (my favourite author of the four) writes in her first letter, “What is it, about this particular friendship, that makes you pick a side?” Jill proposes that it might be the familiar, delimited dyads within which the two girls are grouped early in the series: beautiful/smart, slutty/chaste, affable/hostile, etc. This divvying up recruits a sense of wanting to affiliate with one of them more.

Jill also writes about the insufficiency of platonic language to describe Lila’s and Elena’s relationship. Ferrante sometimes borrows from the language of romantic love, yet the two dramas (the platonic and the romantic) are coterminously inadequate in capturing the scope of their relationship. In her essay “The Queer Counterfactual”, Jill writes about indexed absences in the quartet: Lila’s phantom notebooks, whose entries Lenù summarizes but never encloses; the retrospective indicators of Neapolitan dialect that frame specific speech quotes that are actually written in standard Italian (in the original Italian text, nothing really appears in dialect); and the “queer counterfactual” or the romantic love between Lenù and Lila that could have been. This was a fun essay, but Jill takes us from Pavlov to Freud, using anecdotes and excerpts that you’re likely to wonder, at many points, where she’s taking you. But bit by bit, her argument begins to emulsify, and you start to see how all the sub-ideas and digressions innervate this grander argument. I needed to reread this one as a whole, and then some passages a few times.

In another letter, Sarah Chihaya writes of friendship as a shared fiction, an atmosphere, that exists because both parties humour it. This relationship deteriorates if one party stops believing. Sarah also observes Elena’s descriptive restraint compared to the illustrative verisimilitude Elena observes in Lila’s notebooks: “full of descriptions, the branch of a tree, the ponds, the stone, a leaf with its white veinings, the pots in the kitchen, the various parts of the coffee maker…” This difference in attention to detail can be a condition of Lila’s being within some proximity to the subject of her writing, compared to Elena, who is writing the text we are reading at a great temporal distance from the fact. When I was rereading the quartet, I thought so much about this, Florence. If you go back and re-read the scene of Elena bathing Lila on her wedding day (pages 312-13!), there’s a weird irregularity in pace, a limp, of a moment contorted with urgency, but it is all staged. Elena is reproducing this event on the page for us about 50 years after it has happened, and it is not as impromptu as her syntax and arrhythmic pace make it appear. The fact of the retrospective narrative colours every seemingly effortless flair, or, for lack of a better word currently, a right-nowness (a characteristic of Lila’s) with the inference of intentional tuning and editorial diligence and rigour (all qualities of Elena’s).

Lili Loofbourow, a guest writer, echoes that the “paucity of detailed physical description” spares us from what Sarah calls poverty porn while conceptually respecting the retrospective distance (and so the inevitable slippage of detail) from which the text we are reading originates.

Katherine Hill comments on the presence of two accounts of every event, given the life of Lila’s notebooks. This made me grow aware of a narrative astigmatism that Elena’s single text (which I’m reading only in English) somewhat corrects. But the paranoia of receiving a missing image (or half an image) remains, of course. The first part of this paranoia is regarding the access to one account when there is a fuzziness held by two accounts, not superimposed and reconciled, and the second is the inevitable paranoia regarding the English translation from the Italian text.

Merve Emre interviews Ferrante for her essay, and so I read her piece with great eagerness because it contains new original Ferrante material that I hadn’t thought I would read anytime soon. She comes off as cold and volatile, ignoring much of Merve’s prodding and responding with what she seems to want to say irrespective of the question, sometimes expanding on her answers generously, other times curt. I enjoyed how the four authors and their guests referred to Nino as the Marxist Pixie Dream Boy and how much they collectively hated him.

As I was reading this book, I felt so overwhelmed with all the dizzying potential of what every little detail and choice could mean, the soup of infinite interpretations especially from a story contained and finished: what can it mean that Elena and Ferrante are both authors, what does it mean that Lila mostly wrote “plein-air” and Elena only retrospectively, that Elena allows herself to be decentered in her own story, that she says Lila is not in her words, that she fantasizes about Lila permeating her words, that Lila is afraid of dissolving boundaries, and what boundaries? What might this have to do with Lila’s passion for creating boundaried block diagrams of everything around her? What might Lila’s fear of dissolving boundaries have to do with Ferrante noting in her book In the Margins that she alternates between compliant writing (within the margins) and impetuous writing? Why is Ferrante hesitant to reproduce fragments of Lila’s writing (also in In the Margins)? This vastness of meaning, by the way, even though the reference point (the quartet) is confined and finished, has to terrify Lila.

Dizzy with thought,
Salma

[Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

If all literary criticism had this approach, I'd read more of it now that I'm out of school. The various letters were great and a more streamlined way if communicating some of the main points and criticisms of the novels.

[Jenna Watson]

I could take or leave the actual Ferrante analysis here, but loved the concept of collective criticism, academic writing done in community, a slow burn that lets conversation and contemplation shape academic argument over time.

[Firdaus · Rating 4 out of 5]

A big thank you to Net Galley for sending me this book to review.

One spring day, Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill and Jill Richards decided to spend their summer reading and writing about the work of a single author. Elena Ferrante was their unanimous choice. They exchanged thoughts and criticism through letters written over the summer. The work, as they stressed, was not ‘collaborative’ but ‘collective’ as each of them worked independently in their respective locations and exchanged their views in an epistolary fashion.

All four of them are professors and what is remarkable about the letters is that they are free from critical literary jargon and can be read by all readers who are enthusiastic about Elena Ferrante and her Neapolitan Quartet as the inspiration behind this book was to share ideas which the professors had when they read the book.

For those who are not very familiar with the novels, a brief outline is included. It is stressed that the series is about female friendships, the relationship between the girls is balanced, it is not a bildungsroman—that would be a very simple classification; there are several strands—social, historical bad political beside the emotional.
Many readers will not realise the significance of the copper pot which suddenly explodes which is symbolic of the gradual undoing of the Cerullo family. Nor will the lay reader pay much attention to the cover of the book; the images lack physical detail and fit in very well with the theme of erasure which so important in the novel: Lila’s disfigurement of her wedding photograph; Lenu’s disposal of Lila’s diaries into the river and of course Lila’s disappearance without a trace.
The second part of the book is a result of the ideas which were discussed in the letters as well as some essays from doctoral students. This part of the book is more difficult to read and critical theory and theorists do make a frequent appearance. Merve Emre’s contribution on ‘The Cage of Authorship’ makes interesting reading because it brings fresh and unknown insights into Ferrante’s relationship with Saverio Costanza who has directed the HBO’s series on the Neapolitan novels. Also interesting are Emre’s own efforts to interview Ferrante and the amusing often cryptic, evasive and brief replies she got to her questions leaving her no wiser at the end of the correspondence.

The book falls into two distinct parts. The first which is aimed at the general reader, where the writing is breezy and chatty; and the essays in the second half of the book which seem to be aimed at the academic audience with references to serious literary critical theorist like Foucault, Cixous, and others. One is curious to know to whom the book will appeal to: the academic fraternity or the lay reader.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Ferrante Letters An

Experiment in Collective Criticism by Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill and Jill Richards is one of the most new intriguing books published by Columbia University Press.

Four women of letters decided one day of writing a book, exchanging their own critical letters through a fertile and absolutely captivating correspondence with the other participants, analyzing a saga of an author that they would have picked up. Choices were immense as you can imagine, but at the end their attention fell on the books written by mysterious Elena Ferrante.

The book is divided in three sections. In the first one you find the correspondence of these four teachers, the second are various essays that I know you will find extremely interesting and at the end in the appendix, letters written by people involved in this conversation about Elena Ferrante and her books thanks to the authors's invitation.

I read recently a book where the author admits that the best of writing is this one: the possibility of re-capture the past, resuscitating it, for setting people free; in a way or in another a writer heals problems, re-putting in the correct order the events of a life-time; this process means sharing informations, feelings, honesty in the narration. It should be all the time in this way.

Sure, these authors articulate, sometimes a writer can be "dishonest." A writer, as also admitted these teachers sometimes can't be loyal: first of all this friend, as Elena is knows Lila so well? She can changes fragments of the story for keeping the novel more interesting.
Is it true the portrait donated us by Elena? It depends; surely is more real than not a tale written maybe by someone who hadn't never met that girl but that had just heard of her.

Friends remain in grade of perceiving, capturing the soul of another person and they can guess, understand, feelings, emotions, and emotive state; why? Because they are "in love" in a completely different way, with and for another soul. What a friend searches in another person is that pieces in grade of completing her/his character. A friend is a discovery, a powerful engine.

Sometimes being friend is searching for someone completely different from us as it happened for Elena and Lila.

Lila and Elena were two different universe, but not because, after all, there was a great difference in their existence; more or less their life, people they met in a daily base were the same ones; but yes, the family of Lila, was more practical and less intrigued by school, education and a possibility of bettering the existence through culture. Lila was very intelligent but no one in her family invested in culture. This one was perceived by them like another language.

Lila at the end will prefer a more practical life, the one every daughter born in that district of Napoli would have choosen because the only possible one.

Elena is absolutely absorbed by the violence, brutal character of Lila, when she meet her the first one and they are little; and she is powerfully attracted by it.
Lila feels the necessity of being strong every second of her existence. Elena is passive regarding life. She is simply an observer, while Lila acts, acts every second of her existence.
To Lila, my point of view, being a prepotent and feareless girl means to her trying to giving back to life the answer to the existence that that same life donated her; her answer to the asperity of an existence that, she understood, wouldn't never been too pleasant.

Errors committed by Lila has been maybe the common consequences of choices she made for trying to stay more happy with a man plenty of money, without asking too much to her existence; but that one will be just the beginning of other tribulations.

The two girls read together Little Women when still at the elementary school, and it was for them a formative book: they imagined a beautiful existence, where they would have been in grade of reading but also writing many books, telling stories. They both fell in love for Jo March, the girl more independent, more free than the rest of the other sisters March. Amy was in love for beauty; Meg was the perfect little woman devoted to the house; Beth the sweetest one.

The authors will write a lot about the idea of disappearance; disappearing without existing anymore is possible? Under many ways, maybe for the person, but not for the rest of people who touched that existence. As you will read the result of this conversation will be absolutely touching.
What we know for sure is that Lila, tormented by her sad past, had a desire: leaving this world for good, every single cell of her body deleted from the stage of life.

An author of this book arranged an interview with mysterious Elena Ferrante, without, after all obtaining a lot of answers. She tried to contact her via the American publishing house, (they declined at first the interview and later, accepted it) via Ann Goldstein American translator of the Ferrante's books.

Personally I discovered the Ferrante's world for case. Ann Goldstein, American translator of all the books of the Ferrante's saga was in Umbertide, at Civitella Ranieri for a meeting two years ago. What attracted me of that lady, so skinny, and with a sweet face when I received the newsletter with the invitation, was just a fact, I confess: she was once a co-editor of the The New Yorker. I read that magazine when I find it, and to me is one of the best ones in circulation. It's a temple of the American Journalism, and I wanted to see who could be a co-editor of that immensity. Personally, I didn't know anything of Elena Ferrante; I didn't know who that italian writer was and obviously when I introduced Anna Maria to Goldstein, from her face I understood I mispelled the name of Elena Ferrante: not having heard that name before I didn't feel any shame.

Beautiful book! For everyone, if you are new at the Ferrante's world this one will be a great introduction. If you read the books it will be a formative reading and a possibilily of seeing the story under many different ways thanks to these authors that won't leave any voice apart.

Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.

[Patricia Vidal · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was my dear companion to the Neapolitan Quartet for the three years or so that I took to learn how to say goodbye to the life-long friendship of Lenu and Lina. I felt part of this book club, and after closing each novel of the series, I devoured the letters of Dear Sarah, Dear Merve, Dear Katherine, Dear Jill, Dear Brilliant Friends, professional literary critics embarked in creating an iterative collective form that carries the pleasure of 'the intimate labour of conversation as part of scholarship'. The experiment unfolded during the 2015 summer, so its name: ´The Slow Burn'. Ferrante's work was fittingly suggestive: ¨The solitude of women's minds is regrettable¨ laments Lenu, so the Ferrante letters, an academic book written in epistolary form attempts to become an antidote against the illusion of writing as an individual accomplishment.

'Our goal was to formalize the texture of togetherness to show that this, as much as putting one word next to another, is the labor of writing'

Collective criticism is feminist praxis, it laughs at the competitive culture that permeates academia, quantifying success in each publication, tied to an individual name. That again echoes with our two Elenas. The vanity of Greco who would sell her daughters to become a brilliant author, and the project of Ferrante herself refusing to sign with HER own name.

The book purposefully gives up on an static argument, it rather evolves multidirectionally, changing their author's views, and building ideas on previous letters, and nurturing these concepts from the private lives of the authors, that is, reading with depth and feeling. For instance, Merve dissecting motherhood in the novel while she has just discovered she is pregnant; or Sarah confessing she doesn't remember a time when she herself didn't think about disappearing as Lila.

The second part of the book reaps the fruits of this long-sustained conversation. There are four essays that retrieve and develop those insistent observations spread across the letters, with no pompous literary argot -I mean, most of the time-, and always invoking feelings of their domestic lives:

- Unform by Sarah (CHIHAYA, NYU, contemporary fiction and film in English) - ok this one is my favourite: Lenu's ambition of becoming a writer is the story of the pursuit of a form of expression, writing provides a solid world with shapes and borders, a world that attempts to hold space for Lila's dissolving terrors. Lila is the mastery of pure un-form, a verb, a shapeshifter. Then Sarah thinks of un-forming at a higher level: the novel itself plays with the pleasure of the perfection of form : Ferrante's writing is the doing and undoing of it repeatedly, taking shape and losing it, an oscillation that becomes the "unsettling thrill" of Ferrante's writing: the reader sees their inner stitches, in the midst of falling apart. Writing, in Ferrante, is "the feeling of being made and unmade", just as the women of the neighbourhood. To feel these thoughts, Sarah speaks of her Lenu-Lila relationship with Rebecca, her "memory palace", the one friend against whom she forms.
- friendship is mutual reading in order to learn how to read one self, a lesson that in Ferrante requires "to brutally rip away the garment of beautiful form and reveal the raw-edged fragments beneath". But friends who we have known for decades can turn in texts we read too much, lost magic, love might curl into resentment, separation, growing apart. For Ferrante, separation is unform, generative violence "eviscerated, yet alive" through splitting apart. A plant needs to be cut to grow back.

- The Story of a Fiction by Katherine (HILL, Adelphi, creative writing): Katherine draws upon interviews to Ferrante, the persona, to throw light on the Neapolitan Quartet as autofiction, in the sense Gennette understands it: "an intentionally contradictory pact". Elena Ferrante herself is a fictional character, a close friend, one of Katherine´s Lilas, who keeps winning by being smarter (she achieves creative freedom by hiding her identity, as opposed to poor Katherine, who has already published a book with her real name and face).
Ferrante set many traps to her readers to nurture literary truth. She creates two author characters: one inside fiction, Elena Greco, and other outside, Elena Ferrante, both clearly "autobiographically inflicted fictional identities". But what type of lifelikeness is Ferrante pursuing ? Katherine will try to dissect all artifice in Ferrante's naturalness (just as Lenu describes Lila's notebooks that would throw in the Arno): from the continuos sources that Lenu evokes (gossip from neighbourhood friends, Lila's notebooks, etc) as to justify her intrusion in the inner lives of her characters, to authorship as an ambiguous feeling, that ultimately makes her lose Lina for good. Why must Ferrante being nobody? Katherine says, to strip away the text of authoritative interpretation and therefore to allow multiple readings, to let readers and characters to become someone.

The I's in Ferrante's writing are always You.


- The Queer Conterfactual by Jill (RICHARDS, Yale, women's, gender and sexuality) - fun one! : reading Lina and Lenu´s friendship as naive lesbian fantasy, Professor Richards ? well, the novels nurture counterfactual imagination by fictionalising the writing over and through the other (i mean, what is this novel but Lenu's rewiriting of Lina's notebooks!). So Jill takes what is not there, and think with it through Lenu's writing, as a translation of Lina's feeling. She analyses the phantom notebooks, the missing dialect, the queer counterfactual, and Elena Ferrante's anonymity.

- The Cage of Authorship by Merve (EMRE, Wesleyan, creative writing and criticism) - So Claudio Gatti found out who was Elena Ferrante through the leaked financial statements of the editorial E/O and this essay forced me to betray Elena and read who she actually is --- aaaaaahrg!

[Siyu · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was reading the quartet, I distinctively felt this “pleasurable unpleasure” that makes it impossible to put down the book, but at most times, feeling somewhat uncomfortable - the honesty, the class consciousness, the lack of description of the physical environment, which the emotional intensity makes up for, the ending that is so real and disappointing at the same time… The collection of essays from the four authors and the guest authors helped me make sense of what it is that made the reading so enjoyable and unpleasant at the same time. The letters were less interesting, but a good companion in any case.

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can't wait to do a full reread of the Neapolitan Quartet. Reading it was such a fever dream and I couldn't get them done fast enough. Diving back in inspired me to watch the television show for now which I am enjoying more than I remembered after I started and then quit again. This was fun, if not maybe that new to me. Mostly like joining a fan club for a little while.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd like to thank Netgalley and Columbia University Press for allowing me to read this book. It was quite an experience. I had read all four books of the Napolitan Quartet four years ago. As I started reading the Ferrante Letters, I went back to my Library and got My Brilliant Friend out. I'm now working my way through all four of them a second time. I put down the Letters until I finished My Brilliant Friend.

This book is a compilation of letters that four academic women sent to each other over the course of a summer. In advance, they picked the book(s) they wanted to read, set up the guidelines and went their separate ways to learn what would happen. Clearly they thought it a success or I wouldn't have been reading the published results. The book isn't for everyone. It helps if you have academic blood in your veins, but anyone who loves The Quartet and is interested in what someone else liked and found interesting will enjoy reading these letters.

Personally I found I needed these four women to bring some important themes to my attention. The first time
I read the Quartet, I zoomed right through them finding them hard to put down. This second time, I'm reading much slower and still I missed things: the violence in the neighbourhood in direct proportion to the poverty; the competition between the girls with whatever is handy. First schooling and when Lina no longer went to school, riches and wealth. The letters also point out the cruelty between the two and that it comes with the territory. I looked back over the many books I've read about friendship and I have never read the cruelty of friendship stated so matter of factly. Or the passion. Or the many other qualities of a friendship that last over sixty years.

The Ferrante Letters made me think. And I liked that. I'm ready to start all over again from the beginning. I also found it interesting that these women didn't know each other well when they started writing the letters to each other. They seemed inspired by the friendship between Lena and Lila. They jumped right into deep revelations, questions and remarks. They are very different personalities and it was enjoyable sensing the different thoughts about the themes they talked about. I loved that one of them went to Naples and tried to find the neighbourhood. That's something I would have done. That's love!

I recommend this book to anyone who loved the Ferrante Napolitan Quartet and who want to be stimulated to consider the books more thoughtfully. It is a book you could read and put down and pick up again later. In fact, I don't think one should read this book in one helping.

I suspect this was a one time experiment but I would love it if they did the same thing with another beloved book.

[Vincent · Rating 5 out of 5]

My star ratings are really meaningless. Probably more so here than most of my other reviews. That said, I did like this quite a bit and I finished it in like 2 and a half vacation days, so that says something. The rating, and a large portion of my enjoyment, is tied to the letters sections, both the four main collaborators and the guests. This is the type of criticism (here it's literary, but this style could and should extend elsewhere) I enjoy thoroughly. My favorite criticism are those that cross into the personal and manifest specific emotional connections to the text or whatever topic. So the letters here which traverse summer experiences, past ferrante readings, academia, political theory, and more are truly great. The more I reflect on my Ferrante reading the more I realize just how thorough, dense, and just fucking great these books are. So reading more perspectives on this text with totally different takeaways was immensely fulfilling.

That said, the essay section was a bit of a slog, but also very good and refreshing? I don't know. Maybe I just don't like academic literary criticism. It reminded me a lot of high school and college where we analyzed passages and interpretations in a way I found constricting and joy sucking. But, I don't think I'd assign those adjectives to these essays in the slightest. Perhaps it just recalled bad memories that I haven't gotten over. Yet, certain parts of the essays did feel bloated and I did more or less finish each of the essays, with the thought , "the core ideas here are really interesting, but why was this so long and I don't care about these other literary references." Maybe that just means I'm a dumbass or not the target of these writings, but whatever that was my takeaway. Also, everytime Jill Richards mentioned how when she teaches literary criticism she tells her students to not do this or that, I thought, "yes, this is why I hate most literary criticism, and fell off English and writing as an academic exercise."

In some sense, it felt like reading the reactionary mind and other dense political theory text, where I did spend a lot of time drudging through and being annoyed with the language, but ultimately the core takeaways of the book were good enough that I didn't care about my relative lack of enjoyment with the process.

[Toni · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Ferrante Letters exist for one audience only: The exuberant Ferrante Fan. This brilliant book is like an academic book club of sorts. Four literary, intelligent women got together to discuss the quartet of writings, four books, by the writer know as Elena Ferrante, beloved by many. This collection is a testament of that incredible gathering.

Personally, I sought out this book in hopes that it would help me better understand what I was missing in my understanding of Ferrante's books, and in all truth, the appeal! I just could not see it, and I desperately wanted to see it. I needed help! Even my Italian heritage was of no help! (Weak smile.)

These four educated and successful and accomplished women saw it and they wrote this book to help others see it! Here it is for all to read; really you must read; it's as if you've gained admittance to a really special book club.

There's a word in Italian, it's really slang and strongly changed in each dialect, so I'm not going to even attempt it here, but it basically translates to: "hardhead." There's probably a word in every language for kid or person who's stubborn or a hardhead; well, that was me. I was called that name in my family constantly.

So, if you can relate, ignore them and read this anyway. Authors appeal to each person in different ways. That does not label them or us as good or bad, just a different connection.

Thank you Netgalley, and the women authors of the Ferrante Letters

[Rebecca H.]

This book is a must-read for anyone who loves Elena Ferrante and for anyone who wants to think about new directions in literary criticism. Four critics got together and decided to read Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels over the course of a summer and write letters to each other about the experience. This book collects those letters and also includes a more formal essay by each author developing ideas explored during the group reading. The letters and essays mix personal responses to the books with insights into their artistry: their characters, style, themes, etc. As a Ferrante fan, and as someone who likes innovative writing about literature, I loved this unusual form of criticism. The letters and essays felt intimate, ground-breaking, and vital. I would love to see more academic criticism that is communal and unafraid to acknowledge that it’s written by real people whose lives, experiences, and emotions affect their interpretations.

https://bookriot.com/2020/01/08/indie...

[cb · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is everything that's wonderful about reading and criticism and intellectual comradeship—it's probing; it's collaborative; it's playful. The ideas build on top of each, accumulating into something bigger and more beautiful. It made me see Neapolitan novels, some of my favorite books of all time, in a new way, made me appreciate them even more. I saw—felt—new layers in books that I love. Very grateful for this brilliant and inspiring book. I wish this is what criticism and academia could be like more often. It's a rebuke to the scholar/critic working alone, and it enacts how must of us read—in a community, with friends whom we respect and admire and who push us to see more.

I think anyone who takes reading seriously (but not without a sense humor) should read this book—it's model of reading and criticism and friendship that I we can all learn from and that I wish would spread far beyond the confines of this book.

[Frankie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a slow read but I quite enjoyed it. I struggled at times to separate the voices of the different writers talking through the Neapolitan series, but at a certain point it came together and also stopped mattering. I found lots in here to enjoy even beyond my interest in Ferrante’s work. In that sense it kind of annoyed me that the introduction worked so hard to justify the book’s existence and significance. This is an imperative in academia, but I think this book has a broader appeal alongside Frantumaglia and the series itself. I wish I had experienced the Slow Burn project in real time(apparently the book came out of a blog or website) but this was definitely a worthwhile read and I’ll miss the companionship of these people. It almost makes you feel that you’ve been in conversation.

I received this as an advance reading copy from netgalley.

[AcademicEditor · Rating 4 out of 5]

(This title constantly reminded me of the Cheever letters episode of Seinfeld.)

This book will not be everyone's cup of tea, but I really enjoyed it. It is sort of a book club meets epistolary novel--4 women (3 academics, 1 novelist) take on reading the works of Elena Ferrante one summer, writing long letters to each other, emulating the intellectual exchange between Lenu and Lila in Ferrante's novels. Each offers a longer essay in part II, revealing very different takes on what they uncovered in this reading project. Finally, there are several guest letters from others lucky enough to join the discussions. And some great notes and references that would be useful to anyone studying Ferrante.

Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for a digital ARC for the purpose of an unbiased review.

[anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a nice way for me to return to literary criticism when my days of studying English and literature feel like a lifetime ago - and they may as well be as I've landed in a different career. It was fun to engage with this way of thinking, even when I didn't entirely agree with each of the readings.

In my mind, this literary criticism is second to Frantumaglia, and it was helpful for me that I had already read that, though it isn't necessary. I would not read this collection without reading the Neapolitan novels first.

Excellent for a serious literary "conversation" about Ferrante that is difficult to find at most book clubs or over brunch. It also made me want to reread the novels.

[Gab N · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love these letters… I loved them in grad school, when I first read them on the LARB’s website, and I love them even more now that they’ve been collected into a single volume.

If you loved the Neapolitan novels, and have found yourself spouting incoherent enthusiasms when asked why you loved them, and how they were a paradigm shifting reading experience, and changed your sense of what the novel, as a form, can do—these are for you.

[Lauren Hakimi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book name-dropped lots of scholars and used sophisticated language to express mostly unsophisticated ideas. Though they used interesting quotes from Ferrante's work that I enjoyed, the essays didn't really take me anywhere. It is not clear to me how the authors' collaboration actually benefited their criticism.

[Erika · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the essays at the end, especially the first one, more compelling than the actual correspondence but an interesting idea

[Anita Raychawdhuri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really beautiful, accessible, and thoughtful literary criticism. Sort of book I’d love to write. I love how the letters mimic the complicated friendship of Lila and Lenu.

[Genevieve Savage · Rating 4 out of 5]

the closest anyone will ever make me get to enjoying literary criticism

[Zawar Ahmed · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5, book club w Tiber, Tina, and Meera

[Layla Platt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book took me a while to get through. As someone who doesn’t read a lot of criticisms this was a bit of a challenge for me but I am so thankful I read it.
I loved knowing that other people had the same ideas and thoughts I did while reading the quartet.