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In the Margins. On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing Hardcover – March 17, 2022
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“Elena Ferrante has established herself as the foremost writer in Italy - and the world.” THE SUNDAY TIMES
A delightful collection of original essays on reading and writing.
From the internationally acclaimed author of My Brilliant Friend, The Lying Life of Adults, and The Lost Daughter, come four revelatory pieces offering rare insight into the author’s formation as a writer and life as a reader. Ferrante warns us of the perils of “bad language”―historically alien to the truth of women―and advocates for a collective fusion of female talent as she brilliantly discourses on the work of her most beloved authors. A delightful collection of essays exploring reading and writing from the internationally acclaimed author of My Brilliant Friend and The Lying Life of Adults.
Ferrante’s writing has been described as compulsive (The Times) and astonishing (Guardian), her novels have sold millions and been translated into many languages as well as adapted for TV internationally.
- Print length111 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherEuropa Editions
- Publication dateMarch 17, 2022
- Dimensions5.47 x 0.59 x 8.35 inches
- ISBN-101787704165
- ISBN-13978-1787704169
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Product details
- Publisher : Europa Editions
- Publication date : March 17, 2022
- Edition : 1st
- Language : English
- Print length : 111 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1787704165
- ISBN-13 : 978-1787704169
- Item Weight : 7.9 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.47 x 0.59 x 8.35 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #4,471,918 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #171 in Essays (Books)
- #27,503 in Women's Biographies
- #105,840 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Elena Ferrante is the author of seven novels, including four New York Times bestsellers; The Beach at Night, an illustrated book for children; and, Frantumaglia, a collection of letters, literary essays, and interviews. Her fiction has been translated into over forty languages and been shortlisted for the MAN Booker International Prize. In 2016 she was named one of TIME’s most influential people of the year and the New York Times has described her as “one of the great novelists of our time.” Ferrante was born in Naples.
Customer reviews
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book inspiring, with one noting how the author doesn't hide her influences. The writing quality receives positive feedback, with one customer describing how it transforms scribbled gibberish into something beautiful.
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Customers find the book inspiring, with one mentioning it provides an interesting guide to her thoughts and another noting that the author does not hide her influences.
"...She does not hide her influences, but rather carefully describes how she came to be Ferrante and the germs that led to her novels." Read more
"For fans of Elena Ferrante, this is an interesting guide to her thoughts and some of her intellectual background as a reader and writer." Read more
"I love all Elena Ferrantes books! This one was esoecially inspiring to give in hard copy to my granddaughter, who wants to become a writer." Read more
Customers appreciate the writing style of the book, with one noting how it transforms scribbled gibberish into something beautiful.
"...pen to page, fingers to keyboard and then transforming the scribbled gibberish in something beautiful. Oh, the anguishing pain! Oh, that supreme joy!..." Read more
"...Great read, great service from the seller. I would recommend the book and the seller." Read more
"...And I gave her two stars on this book mostly because she writes well. But this book was not what I expected...." Read more
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Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on October 14, 2023Format: KindleVerified PurchaseI have read all of Ferrante’s work and found these short lectures extremely illuminating. She does not hide her influences, but rather carefully describes how she came to be Ferrante and the germs that led to her novels.
- Reviewed in the United States on December 29, 2022Format: KindleVerified PurchaseFor fans of Elena Ferrante, this is an interesting guide to her thoughts and some of her intellectual background as a reader and writer.
- Reviewed in the United States on July 21, 2022Format: KindleVerified PurchaseFor those of us who struggled in a “Bone Head” course on the fundamentals of grammar, Ferrante’s “In the Margins” comes like a lightening bolt on what authorship is all about: the electricity of putting pen to page, fingers to keyboard and then transforming the scribbled gibberish in something beautiful. Oh, the anguishing pain! Oh, that supreme joy! Don’t miss a word of her remarkable story of giving written voice to our mirage of thoughts. And be sure to seek out the discovery of the female voice invading the empire of male literature. Ferrante’s Odyssey offers new light on twice told tales about the art of writing.
- Reviewed in the United States on April 30, 2024A challenging read. It's a series of written but never delivered lectures on books, reading, and writing that really comes across as romantic musings. It's beautiful in its way but not very accessible because the author is giving her readers a glimpse into her own mind and heart about her craft that sounds lovely but makes little sense to anyone but her because it is so very personal.
- Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2023The mysterious Elena Ferrante is glimpsed though this book in a way the public doesn't normally get a chance to experience.
Great read, great service from the seller. I would recommend the book and the seller.
- Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2022Revelatory and insightful, IN THE MARGINS is a must-read for writers. Ferrante provides an inside look at her reading and writing life, including a scholarly examination of Dante and other, more personal, essays in which she explores limitations placed on women and grappling with her own self doubt. I appreciate her honesty and advice.
- Reviewed in the United States on June 28, 2022I love all Elena Ferrantes books!
This one was esoecially inspiring to give in hard copy to my granddaughter, who wants to become a writer.
- Reviewed in the United States on April 5, 2022Format: Kindle"I believe that the sense I have of writing -and all the struggles it involves- has to do with the satisfaction of staying beautifully within the margins and, at the same time, with the impression of loss, of waste, because of that success".
Elena Ferrante's elusive, enigmatic persona has become a subject of heated debates within the European literary world as her phenomenally influential corpus of work combined with her insistence to keep her identity concealed under the use of a pseudonym, intrigued and still pique the interest of the readers and critics around the world. Ferrante is mostly known for her renowned "Neapolitan Novels" quartet, a four-part series of books narrating the evolution of the relationship between two girls, Lenu and Lila, growing up in Naples during the course of the previous decades, beginning in the 1950s. The novels have been adapted into an equally successful television show by Saverio Costanzo who recounts the story as a whole, divided into four seasons, each corresponding to a book. The exceptional production values of the series, the magnificent performances, and the accurate representation of a foregone era are integrated into the main narrative that remains loyal to the original source, with carefully crafted dialogue parts and a melancholic atmosphere pervading the story that captivates the audience with its astuteness and precision in the description of life in Naples after the end of the Second World War.
Apart from Costanzo's series, there are several creators in both cinema and television who attempted to adapt Ferrante's work on screen, the latest example being The Lost Daughter by director Maggie Gyllenhaal, starring Olivia Colman in the role of Leda, a middle-aged divorcee who is tormented by the burden of memories of past choices that she made as a mother and the consequences for her loved ones. The themes of motherhood, broken family relationships, and the struggles of the contemporary Western woman are thoroughly explored almost in every work bearing the signature of the obscure Italian writer and her novels are a testament on the challenges that women have to face, lost in the multiplicity of the roles they assume today. For those who wish to learn more about Ferrante's impact on the contemporary artistic world, there is the documentary Ferrante Fever by Giacomo Durzi in which people from various fields of social, political, and cultural life such as Hillary Clinton, Roberto Saviano, and Jonathan Franzen try to analyze the sensational phenomenon of Ferante's success, analyzing parts of her work, while trying to locate that element which deems her writing style as one of the most arresting in contemporary European literature.
In In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing, Ferrante chronicles her first experiences as a reader during her childhood, while in the course of four separate chapters explains her perspective on writing, approaches the concept of truth in the literary context, the limitations imposed by form and genre and other subjects relating to her experience as an author. She also references authors and books that left a mark in her mind and heart and determined her own distinctive style. The first three chapters in the book ("Pain and Pen", "Aquamarine", "Histories, I") were initially written in the form of lectures intended to be given in the University of Bologna on three successive days in the autumn of 2020 but Covid-19 pandemic forced the organizers of the seminar to cancel the speeches which were however presented in Teatro Arena del Sole in Bologna in November of 2021 by the actress Manuela Mandracchia. The fourth essay, "Dante's Rib" was composed at the invitation of the Association of Italianists (ADI) and concluded the conference Dante and Other Classics on April 29, 2021.
In the first essay, Ferrante writes that her first impressions from literature were, almost exclusively, drawn by male authors and from an early age, she realized that being a female would be a setback in her attempts at producing original literary work: "Although I was a woman, I couldn't write as a woman except by violating what I was diligently trying to learn from the male tradition". Furthermore she makes an important distinction between the two only ways of writing which she recognizes: "the first compliant, the second impetuous". That distinction remains important and topical throughout this little book and dictates the manner in which Ferrante interprets her own work. The relationship between the two aforementioned modes of writing constitutes the main subject of the first essay. She advocates for the essential multiplicity of the "I Who Writes" by citing two passages from Virginia Woolf's work and concludes her reasoning with the aphorism: "The writer has no name". Perhaps that is the reason why Ferrante is so insistent in keeping her true identity hidden from the public as she perceives her writing self not as a unity by as a multiplicity of egos colluding in order to create a work of fiction which is reduced to a "convulsing act" instead of "an elegant studied gesture".
Both in the first and the third essay, Ferrante talks about the inevitability of form which is, in Samuel Beckett's words, "the only thing we can't do without in literature and any other place", though she believes that it is possible for an author to both abide to and deny the rules of the form and she cites as an example Gertrude Stein's book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in which the author "takes a highly structured genre like autobiography and deforms it", through the use of breakthrough narrative techniques balancing "in a complex interplay of identification and estrangement" which allows the author to find his own voice. Finally, Stein "upends the traditional relations between invented story, autobiographical truth, and biographical truth". Of course, as Ferrante is eager to ascertain her readers, there is no parthenogenesis in literature. The writer is forced to to adopt words and phrases that have been previously used by other writers. As she explicitly states: "we have to accept the fact that no word is truly ours" and she also points out that "writing is, rather, entering an immense cemetery where every tomb is waiting to be profaned". What Ferrante means is that the basic tools of an author, words, are only accessible through the act of reading texts written in the past. She also writes that "true sentences, good or epochal, always seek a path of their own within cliches. And cliches were once true sentences that dug a way among cliches".
Throughout the book, Ferrante references many significant authors such as Italo Svevo, Adriana Cavarero, Virginia Woolf, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Samuel Beckett, Emily Dickinson and others who support her solid arguments regarding the subject of truthful writing and its inextricable link with fervent reading. In the concluding essay which focuses on the work of one of the founders of the modern-day Italian language, Dante Alighieri, whose works set the precedent for other important writers such as Petrarch and Boccaccio who would follow, adding their own genius and establishing the basis of modern European literature. Ferrante first read Dante in the age of sixteen and since then his work heavily influenced her way of thinking and writing. According to Ferrante, Dante was the ideal reader as he "entered the others' worlds so inanimately that he was able to capture their secrets of meaning and beauty, and achieve through them a writing of his own". She also writes that his conception of Beatrice's character, Dante's muse and inspiration for writing the Divine Comedy, was way ahead of its time as until then, women were mainly portrayed as silent creatures with little or no tendency to the the more noble aspects of cultural and spiritual life. Beatrice, though, is a symbol of a woman who "has an understanding of God and speculative language" and her character summarizes "what is possible for women", something that evokes Ferrante's feelings of gratitude for Dante.
It would be an unforgivable omission not to mention Ferrante's New-York-based permanent translator, Ann Goldstein, who has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship and is the recipient of the PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award. Goldstein interpretation of Ferrante's original texts is flawless and the English-speaking readership is fortunate enough to relish the Italian author's prose without losing anything from its finesse and beauty. In the Margins is not an easy book to read and you will have to re-read some of its passages in order to fully grasp the concepts which Ferrante so aptly handles. It is a great addition to the list of books on writing and those who aspire to write someday should definitely check out. For me, it was a great chance to get acquainted with one of the most ambiguous, cryptic writers of our era and provided plenty of thoughts to chew on, while prompting me to watch the television and film adaptations of Ferrante's books that look promising. Soon, I will start reading one of her fiction novels and a thorough review will follow.
Top reviews from other countries
- UlyssesReviewed in Italy on September 1, 2022
1.0 out of 5 stars noioso
noises
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ANAReviewed in Brazil on May 14, 2022
4.0 out of 5 stars IN THE MARGINS. - ELENA FERRANTE
Muito interessante, porém como ela se refere a diversos autores durante a narrativa, embora sejam citações esclarecedoras que nos colocam obrigatoriamente em contato com eles, me surpreendeu. Não esperava encontrar este fato. Nada disto tira o mérito do conjunto da obra. É apenas uma opinião.
- RajeshReviewed in India on December 22, 2023
5.0 out of 5 stars Light from a writer's heart
Format: HardcoverVerified PurchaseA profound book written with a sage's simplicity.
- Anna AllenReviewed in Germany on July 2, 2022
1.0 out of 5 stars Dissapointing
Tiny, thin book which one could read in 30 minutes. I read 2 pages and it is very much “looking in your own navel” book. The sparse pages are used right at the beginning on photos of author’s school grammar exercises. Two pages with photos of child writing. I do get it, the author sold many books, considers herself important, but let’s not exaggerate. Who keeps their own exercise books from time when we started school and shares them with her audience? I bought this book because of The Guardian. It suppose to be the exciting read, but nothing can be further from the truth, plus, charging 18 euros for a few pages is outrageous. I assumed I am getting a decent book which will help me in my writing. Packing it up to go back.
- Dr. T. J. HannanReviewed in Australia on March 24, 2022
5.0 out of 5 stars Confirms the difficulties, pleasures of writing and reading. A strong female touch.
Format: KindleVerified PurchaseForm the opening chapter, Pain and Pen, I found this an absorbing read. As an author, I believe Ferrante reveals what all authors must feel or should feel and experience. She gives hope to those who desire to write. Her explanations of the entanglement and disentanglement of thoughts and language when writing, are reassuring and give hope to any would be author.