It was not with the best intentions that I picked up Elena Ferrante's Troubling Love. With just under 150 pages it looked to be a quick and easy read, a cushy book to fill in the numbers on my library reading list. I should know by now that looks can be deceiving. Sometimes, though, the most interesting books are the ones you're not looking for and the ones that aren't easy. Troubling Love turned out to be a dizzying, disorienting read that constantly set me on edge and still has me thinking about it days later.
Elena Ferrante's voice is a unique one (at least compared to the books I normally read). She writes about relationships between mothers and daughters, but not in a warm and fuzzy way that leaves you all glowing and teary-eyed at the end. Troubling Love is an uncomfortable story of among other things identities and how one can subsume the other. It's also about memories and how time plays games with them, so you're left wondering what's really true and what's imagined.
The story begins with the mysterious death of Delia's mother. Delia had expected her to arrive by train several days previously. Instead she received three strange phone calls, each more bizarre than the last. Later Amalia's body is found washed ashore near a small seaside community not far from where her family once vacationed. The body is clad only in a piece of expensive lingerie that she would never have reason to wear or the money to afford. Delia's relationship with her mother Amalia had been an uneasy one. She fled her childhood in Naples for Rome where she works as a comic strip artist. Often Amalia would travel there to visit, rearranging Delia's life in ways that made her feel suffocated. In a strange way the death of her mother was almost a release, as "she would no longer have any obligation to worry about her." And worry she did, ever since she was a small child.
Despite trying to distance herself from her mother, Delia is confronted with facts about her mother's life that appear both sordid and hard to believe. After Amalia's funeral a neighbor tells her that her mother had been seeing a man, distinguished in dress and appearance. Amalia had been estranged from her abusive husband for many years. It's hard to equate the Amalia of Delia's childhood, a shy seamstress who tried hard not to draw attention to herself for fear of her husband's free and easy use of an open hand on her face when he thought she was being provocative, to a woman who days before her death had been seeing a man of extravagance.
In order to understand her death, Delia must dig deep into her own memories. She traverses a Naples that seems so hostile, it's not surprising she left, searching for this mystery man her mother was seeing and finding people from her past to help piece together her mother's life. There were moments as I was reading when I wasn't sure what was real, what was imagined and what was being pulled from Delia's uncertain recollections. All of it a little hazy at first until each scene came into sharp focus. In searching for answers Delia will discover hard truths about her own past and culpability in her mother's death.
I'm trying to be purposely vague about the story (all the better so you can explore it for yourself), which isn't hard as it is rich in imagery that is at times so raw and brutal that it's hard to convey in one short post. Troubling Love was not an especially enjoyable read in the way I think of comfortable, enjoyable reads, but in this case that is not a criticism. This is a compelling read, one that I could appreciate even if there were disconcerting moments along the way (and there were lots of disconcerting moments). Elena Ferrante is a writer of immense talent, and Ann Goldstein must be an exceptional translator to make it all sound as smooth as it did. I'm very impressed with this novel, and I don't even think it's her best. I've already borrowed her newest, The Lost Daughter, though I think I'll need to put a few books in between the two. One other item of note, Ferrante is an acclaimed author in Italy, but she has managed to keep her real identity a secret preferring to stay out of the limelight. Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym. Oh, and this is another of those lovely Europa Editions.