At some point on Sunday 6 February - airing the first episode of the third season of the series The Brilliant Friend, taken from Elena Ferrante's quadrilogy: volume three, The story of those who flee and those who remain- #NinoSarratore appears in the Twitter trend topics, one of the novel's male characters, variously insulted.
There is something for everyone - despicable males abound in the quadrilogy - but no one among the character Ferrante can catalyse the girls' hatred as much as Nino.
"the way Elena Ferrante makes you feel disgust for the male genderno one like her.
"Also for Ferrante, Enzo is the only male character who deserves rights".
"Lila was subjected to unprecedented violence from an early age, not letting her choose her future, not letting her study. Today, if things had gone differently, she would not be suffering so much, she would not be so dull.".
"I don't like Elena Greco, is always serious, never smiling. #AmicaGeniale makes me cryagain. And again. With the audio book I listened to two years ago, and now, with the TV series. Yesterday at 3 a.m. I still didn't want to tear myself away from the second series. It's a realism that shakes you inside...".
Commenting, girls who have mostly only known the masterpiece in its TV version but have never read it and -they say- finally find "something about them", of their relationships with companions, lovers, friends, mothers, sisters and friends. It speaks of them in a profound, lively, carnal way, keeping the history of a country in the background.
"When I write it's like slaughtering eels. Ferrante said of her novels.
And again (Margins and dictation): "The story of the writing - of Elena's writing, of Lila's writing and, in fact, of the author's own writing - is, in my intentions, the thread that holds together the entire encounter-contrast between the two friends and, with it, the the fiction of the world, of the time in which they act'.
Writing means 'loading the genres of expectations'. canonical? Yes, but to disappoint them. In short, to inhabit forms and then unmould everything that which does not contain us in full... I hoped that it would come out, surprising me first, a unexpected truth". Doesn't this unexpected truthto the unexpected subject by Carla Lonzi?
The woman's gaze in Ferrante makes its way by butchering, deforming, dismantling, venturing 'each time into an endless cemetery where every grave waits to be desecrated".
His is a subversive writing because it goes so far as to see what is hidden behind the fiction of the world and that everyone, with a heartbeat, whatever age we are, wherever we live on the planet, immediately we recognise as ours and lost. But perhaps not forever and completely. Our unexpected truth. And we become one body with the bodies of two little girls as they go through their story, more alive and truer than any story.
The girls who watch and rail against Nino, against Soccavo, the Carracci, the Solara, live there with Lila and Lenù, encourage them to revolt, to do justice for themselves and for all. As happened in Greek theatre and then, in direct line, in Neapolitan dramatisations, in which the public takes part in the event represented and interferes cathartically: here, yes, the catharsis of the girls. And also a bit of photostorytelling, a genre that Ferrante does not waste at all.
Together with Lila and Lenù, the girls undertake to rummage through the 'irredeemable rubble' of their childhood, of their lost childhood games, of their sacrificed difference. Difference that they find for once and perhaps will not stop looking for in their lives, step by step.
Ferrante can be written about and talked about and tweeted about endlessly and from many points of view - for my old mother, for example, reading her is 'like being in the family' - but one thing is never said about her that it is good for girls to know: she is she, by now, the most famous difference feminist in the world.
Marina Terragni (with the collaboration of Veronica Tamborini)
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