- Paperback: 144 pages
- Publisher: Europa Editions (Sep 1 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1933372168
- ISBN-13: 978-1933372167
- Product Dimensions: 20.9 x 13.7 x 1.2 cm
- Shipping Weight: 136 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #287,575 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
The pseudonymous Italian author of Days of Abandonment returns with a daughter's attempt to unlock the mystery of her mother's death by drowning following years of domestic abuse. Days before her body washed ashore near her hometown of Naples, Amalia called her oldest daughter, Delia, now 45, with shocking news that she was with a man—not her estranged husband, a two-bit painter—then hung up, laughing. After the funeral (Amalia's husband doesn't show), Delia goes in search of the story behind the expensive new brassiere Amalia was found wearing at her death, incongruous for a poor seamstress who deliberately downplayed her good looks to avoid arousing her husband's savage jealousy. Caserta, a man who acted as Delia's father's agent as well as rival for Amalia's attention, plays a role here—and in Delia's past. In tactile, beautifully restrained prose, Ferrante makes the domestic violence that tore the household apart evident, including the child Delia's attempts to guard her mother from the beatings of her father. By the time of the denouement, Ferrante has forcefully delineated how the complicity in violence against women perpetuates a brutal cycle of repetition and silence. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Forty-five-year-old Delia returns to her childhood home of Naples, Italy, to discover the truth behind the drowning death of her mother, Amalia. Suspicious circumstances surround Amalia's last days; the humble seamstress, who never flaunted her beauty for fear of her jealous husband's wrath, was wearing nothing but an expensive designer brassiere at the time of her death. As Delia wanders the vibrant streets of Naples, she ponders three dubious men who figured prominently in her mother's past: Amalia's irascible brother, known for hurling insults at acquaintances and strangers alike; her husband, a mediocre painter with no qualms about slapping Amalia in public; and his lascivious agent, whose marriage never precluded him from propositioning other women. Ironically, it is her mother's death that enables Delia to make better sense of her own life. "I realized . . . that in fact I had Amalia under my skin, like a hot liquid that had been injected into me at some unknown time." Pseudonymous Italian novelist Ferrante (The Days of Abandonment, 2005) delivers a brutally frank tale about the dangerous intersection of rage and desire. Allison Block
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon Canada
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.8 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews)
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Amalia had the unpredictability of a splinter. I couldn't impose on her the prison of a single adjective.", Oct 1 2006
By Mary Whipple - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Troubling Love (Paperback)
This intense psychological novel, recently translated into English, recreates a daughter's efforts to understand her mother following her mother's mysterious death. Delia, an artist of comic strips, receives three strange phone calls from her mother just before her mother disappears on her way from Naples to Rome to visit Delia. When the body of Amalia, Delia's mother, is ultimately discovered floating near a beach, she is nude, except for a piece of designer underwear, not typical for her mother. Though she has never been close to her mother, Delia is understandably curious about the circumstances of her death, and she leaves Rome to investigate her mother's life in Naples.
There she learns from a neighbor that her mother had been seeing someone. An expensive shirt belonging to a man, and a garbage bag containing her mother's well-mended underclothing, are the only clues to Amalia's recent life. A strange telephone caller tells Delia to leave the laundry bag of dirty clothing for him, and he indicates that he has left a suitcase of her mother's things in the apartment, new designer items, unlike anything her mother has ever worn.
So begins Delia's quest to discover who her mother really was--and, in the process, who she herself is. As she reconnects with a friend from childhood and learns about her mother's recent relationship, she is forced to remember early events in her relationship with her mother, and to re-examine her feelings about her mother's life from her present adult perspective. Ultimately, she must rethink her own role in affecting the outcome of her mother's life.
Author Elena Ferrante, a pen name used by one of Italy's foremost (and most private) contemporary authors, creates haunting mysteries from the lives of ordinary people leading seemingly ordinary lives--the kinds of mysteries which always exist for family members who can never quite get inside the lives and relationships of people they think they know but whose intimate lives they have not shared. Gradually, Delia begins to realize she may be more her mother's daughter than she had realized. Dense with imagery which speaks directly to the reader's own sensibilities about family, this emotional and introspective novel is also full of ambiguities which resonate long after some of the mysteries have been solved. n Mary Whipple
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The uneasiness of bodies, Jan 29 2007
By kubanna - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Troubling Love (Paperback)
"For all the days of her life she had reduced the uneasiness of bodies to paper and fabric..." So Delia describes the life of her deceased mother Amalia, a seamstress. Both the uneasiness of bodies and the way we clothe ourselves are recurring themes in this beautifully crafted and expertly translated novel. Elena Ferrante uses these themes to explore the complexities of mother-daughter relationships, conveying the simultaneous longing and revulsion felt by daughters for their mothers. Of her mother, Delia claims, "I was identical to her and yet I suffered because of the incompleteness of that identity." She reacts by running away from Naples and does not return until forced to do so by her mother's mysterious death. The ensuing trip turns into a deep exploration of Delia & Amalia's pasts and each woman's desires.
As a narrator, Delia is at once distant and intensely emotional. This makes her one of the most compelling characters I have found in modern literature. This book was so engrossing that I read it from start to finish in just under two days. I have discovered a new favorite author in Elena Ferrante.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Unknowability of Those We Love, Nov 21 2006
By L. Young "palmtree2000" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Troubling Love (Paperback)
"My mother drowned on the night of May 23rd, my birthday". So begins this first novel written by the reclusive Italian author Elena Ferrante. Delia, the forty-something daughter goes on a personal odyssey into the past to examine her mother, Amalie's life. When found dead Amalie, a modestly living seamstress is discovered naked except for the lingerie she is wearing from an expensive shop, something completely out of character for her. Why? Did she have a lover? Did she commit suicide? Was her drowning an accident? What role did her estranged husband, Delia's father, play? Into the tangled web of an abusive past Ferrante examines truth, guilt, the validity of memory and finally the essential unknowability of those we love. Although this novel has less dramatic thrust than Ferrante's "The Days of Abandonment" she is a master at crafting sentences of extreme beauty and power.
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
