Body and page

How women of the West – educated, middle-class, urban and hence seemingly privileged – struggle for equilibrium given their recent emergence (just a 100-year history of possibility) is only one of Elena Ferrante’s concerns in Frantumaglia. Her novels show women who are ready to get lost and reappear, not as heroes but with their humanity and curiosity and courage intact. She doesn’t miss the new showmanship or the new frightening imbalances, nor hide her agitation about the larger crisis in education: Who will produce ideas, who will earn a living? She loves cinema but remains partial to literary truths, the body of reticent and tense sentences that make up a page.