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Troubling Love

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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

"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.

"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.

Troubling Love is my third book by an Italian author, who goes by the pseudonym, Elena Ferrante. The other two books, The Days of Abandonment and The Lost Daughter, also published as Europa Editions were a treat to read. All three books were translated from Italian, by Ann Goldstein who did a great job.

Troubling Love, packs a punch, beginning with the opening sentence...."My mother drowned on the night of May 23rd, my birthday, in the sea at a place called Spaccavento, a few miles from Minturno. "

Told from the POV of Delia, the 40+ year old daughter of the late Amalia. While waiting for her mother to visit her traveling from Naples to Rome, Delia receives several strange telephone calls from her mother. One indicating that a man was following her and wanted to wrap her in a carpet, and then another saying that she was going to have a bath. She was discovered floating in the sea, wearing only a lacy and expensive bra, the type of undergarment that her mother would not normally have worn.

Early on the reader learns that when Delia was young, her mother's absences caused Delia much anxiety, as she would stare out of the window endlessly waiting for her return. As an adult, Delia and her mother had a rocky relationship. When her mother would come for a visit she would reorganize her daughter's home to her own liking, causing friction between the two. At her mother's funeral, Delia feels relieved about not having to worry about her 63 year-old mother any longer --she doesn't shed a tear at her funeral, like her two sisters did. Amalia's husband, who she had been estranged from for many many years, did not attend the funeral.

After the funeral, Delia goes to her mother's "dirty and ugly" 4th floor apartment, and begins to look around. She sees several more things that make her wonder about what her mother had been doing the days before she died. Her mother was poor and she typically dressed shabbily; a frugal woman, yet why did she leave the water running in her apartment, and what was that expensive men's shirt doing in her drawer, and what about her other odd possessions?

Delia becomes obsessed with finding out more about her mother's life, and how she died, and in the process she unearths more of her own painful childhood, growing up in an abusive home. Each step along Delia's journey while searching for the truth, her behavior becomes increasingly bizarre, and at times it seemed as if she was hallucinating. Yet how valid are those memories from our past, especially when people tend to repress painful happenings?

Probably even more so than the two other books by this author, Troubling Love is an emotionally charged, at times - sexually raw, and cringe-worthy story. It's not an easy story to read, even though it is just 139 pages, but once you've begun you will not want to put it down.

Italian author Elena Ferrante presents her second novel Troubling Love, the story of a daughter who, upon learning of her mother's untimely death, sets out on a harrowing journey through the streets of Naples in search of the truth about her family. A dark tale of sexuality, the violent dissolution of a marriage, unfulfilling relationships, threatening conditions, and the haunting quest to uncover the truth no matter how frightening it might be.

Great Books And Got Them Very Good Time Only A Few Days Thanks Again D.A.