Elena Ferrante - The Neapolitan Novels

The Lost Daughter

R, 122 minutes

Coming to Netflix Friday, Dec. 31

An appealing take ( also, had wondering where the hell Ed Harris was)
https://www.nashvillescene.com/arts_culture/film_tv/maggie-gyllenhaal-s-i-the-lost-daughter-i-aims-at-a-cherished-institution/article_cd936764-5d0f-11ec-8990-7701b03a82ef.html

i watched this on netflix last night and it's honestly not very good -- my unkind capsule twitter review was "like THE DURRELLS except everyone is horrible"

i haven't read the novel but my sister has and she was also disappointed -- chatting to her abt it just now as she drove me back home to london we agreed that the central performance is interesting and watchable in itself but maybe somewhat adrift from the book's key character (if this matters), that the flashbacks are probably the best and most convincing streches of the film, that key character then and key character now don't really jigsaw into one another in any readable way, and that the village (and most of the rest of the dramatis personae) is way too full of NPCs

ed harris is fine but he doesn't have much to do

ha I had the opposite response: the flashbacks bored me whereas the present-day material felt lived-in and odd (kudos to the editing).

The book is my favorite Ferrante, a condensation of the Neapolitan novels if you don't want to read them.

i thought this was p good (also have not read the book); the flashbacks are convincing but the present day stuff works better imo, agree with the editing/perspective being why it is effective; felt some possible illusions to death in venice whether intended or not

Well the ending was a very clunky copy of Ozu's Late Spring.

rude to keep posting my tweets abt this film but also rude not to lol:

"olivia coleman and jessie buckley are good tho i don't see how the latter grows up to be the former affectwise -- but i thought the entirety of the "other family" was thin stereotypy stuff (probably not helped by switching the locale from southern-most italy to a greek island)"

i think the reason i preferred the flashbacks was that the children in it -- especially the older child -- were more filled out and wilfully characterful: mum with her two kids was very dense and complex. dad was an NPC. the child of the other family was one of the many NPCs that made up the bulk of that family. also i don't think it's well conveyed that coleman remains *at time of story* an Academic PowerhouseTM: she came across fubsier and more hapless, with flashes of command -- like all that was actually past her. but i can't pretend that i missed this or reacted against it while watching (have not read novel; contributed to my sister's disappointment, as she has also done time in the academic salt-mines) -- not being "like the book" is not necessarily a sin…

we (sister and i) did have a good conversation abt how "conferences be like that!" -- tho more often in the fending off than the partaking lol. the academic scenes were very cartoony but i didn't mind that bcz academics SUCK j/k

The flashbacks were more powerful I think bcz it dramatised the complications around motherhood a bit more (this is one of the themes that run throughout Ferrante's writing). In the present day you get a glimpse into the price paid but I wasn't too convinced about the connection the main character makes with the young mother.

Well the ending was a very clunky copy of Ozu's Late Spring.

― xyzzzz__, Monday, January 3, 2022 10:43 AM

Paul Schrader is praised for doing something like that in every film now.

I watched this with my mum on New Year's Day (!) and really enjoyed it. Haven't read the book but I've read the first two Neopolitans. I didn't realise it was a Ferrante story till I read the summary halfway through the movie, and then I was, like, immediately, "Okay I get this now."

There are many moments of easy-to-ridicule earnestness (EVERYONE TAKING EVERYTHING VERY VERY SERIOUSLY) and on-the-noseness (OH NO A METAPHOR FELL ON MY BACK) but Colman is terrific and the story is compellingly (if slightly first-ime-director-showoffishly) told.

I'll disagree about the NPCness - for me the point was to experience the Colman character's alienation, so it kind of makes sense that no one's really "knowable" or makes sense.

I appreciated watching a movie that was miserable without being punishing or over-dour, and recognises that there are ups as well as downs.

We both thought the ending was annoying though

What is NPC? You guys.

Non Phungible Coleman.

non-player characters = eg these lads

https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.661487109.1166/pp,840x830-pad,1000x1000,f8f8f8.u1.jpg

Oh yeah, Proust did that too, and I thought of it as maybe being influenced by visual arts: principals surrounded or among massed turds I mean swells at social gatherings (not really parties unless Charlus shows up)

Paul Schrader is praised for doing something like that in every film now.

― Chris L, Monday, 3 January 2022 13:40 (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

01/07/2022 pic.twitter.com/WHwa78CZja

— paul schrader's facebook posts (@paul_posts) January 8, 2022

01/26/2022 pic.twitter.com/VTfrHg0NeC

— paul schrader's facebook posts (@paul_posts) January 27, 2022

maybe get back to us when paul schrader writes a book

Another one?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn0SL4pi2a8

Another one?

We've already had 50 years to discuss his first one.

excited that they are continuing to make these. I still need to watch season 2 and read book 4, guess I better get on that.

Aa has been discussed here, there has been a lot of speculation as to who Ferrante might be. I mean, the mystery is pretty much solved when that tabloid journo dug through her trash. Until then the speculation (from an academic paper) was that Ferrante was Domenico Starnone. The journo came up with Anita Raja, a translator who happens to be Starnone's wofe.

Well I have been reading Starnone's Ties. A man leaves his wife and children, with all the drama. The novel is short, but in about five pages it manages to go through a meeting between the man and his two children years after the separation, then many years later where the children are grown-up and a line or two about what happens to them is told to you, then back again when there is some sort of reconcilliation between the man and the wronged woman (I've got about a third left to go). You could say its either too busy, or of a risk taken with the writing. Anyhow, a lot of what is happening here is basically Ferrante from a man's perspective (before the Quartet where the writing really expands out). I would not at all be surpised if Ferrante wasn't a collaboration between Starnone and Ferrante (or that Starnone wasn't Ferrante too).

All that aside Starnone should be read as well.

I've only read the first two novels of the quartet so far but they both seemed like they were from a woman's perspective

otm

Lol yes the books are from a woman's perspective. Not denying that.

Starnone not half the writer Ferrante is imo

Lots of European novels that are like "relationships suck". I talk about some of them in April 2020 (Marie Darrieussecq's My Phatom Husband (1998) and The Helios Disaster (2015) by Linda Knausgard). From men I would add Peter Stamm to that (especially Seven Years).

Definitely reading more Starnone, it's comparable to early Ferrante and really good anyway.

"they both seemed like they were from a woman's perspective"

Does this mean: they seemed like they were written by a woman?

That seems question-begging, until we know what the criteria are for recognising that something is written by a woman.

Supposing that there are criteria (eg: something that a computer could recognise), it follows that these could be manipulated, and a male writer could use these codes to create a false impression.

But none of this is to deny that Elena Ferrante is a woman - I don't doubt that she is! (I've not yet read her.) My observation is merely theoretical.

Ferrante has written a lot of non-fiction pieces and most of them are about the experience of being a female creative, writer, female writers through history, women writers and the shield of anonymity and so on. It would actually be kind of weird if she wasn't a woman. And there's never been a compelling reason to believe she isn't.

Yes. I assume that she is.

My own comment was purely a theoretical one about the meaning of the phrase "seemed like they were from a woman's perspective" - not an expression of doubt about this particular author.

My sense is, with the best will in the world, I don't think I've read a book from a women's perspective by a male author that didn't have a few glaring false notes or elisions. I don't get that feeling from Ferrante.

Skimming Starnone he seems more heavy-handed, less rigourously precise.

Supposing that Chuck Tatum is right (and there's a lot of supposition all round here):

Would the reverse logically also be true, ie: a woman author can't quite convincingly write a novel from a male POV?

I don't think I have ever heard anyone say so, or raise it as a problem.

One justification for NOT saying so, and NOT believing that this problem happens, could be: "The world has been male-dominated - thus, women authors have a good idea of what males think and what their POV is - from literature, media, discourse - whereas the reverse is not true, and males do not have enough insight into women's lives".

I feel that that line, though very broad-brush, is ... *partially* convincing.

But one reason why it might still NOT be convincing is that knowing what "male discourse" is like would not necessarily give you a full insight into being an individual person, who happened to be male (and who might eg: feel little connection to some of that discourse).

There is much more to say on this, including that the whole thing is question-begging, ie: I am not certain that there *is* a male or female POV as such, nor what the limits of fiction might be or should be ... My comments are merely speculative.

I'm sure there are plenty of good books written my men from a female perspective - yes, it's just a supposition based on my limited reading.

I can think of plenty of good novels written by women from men's perspectives but I am stumbling to think of any in the other direction - there must be many obvious ones.

(FWIW, the ones I can think of were The Beginning of Spring, the two Tana French books Faithful Place and Broken Harbour, the first Earthsea book... of course the Fitzgerald book is very short, and the French and Le Guin books lean on the reader's familiarity with genre tropes to do some of the heavy lifting.)

Henry James to thread

It would probably be worth having a separate thread for this, it’s an interesting topic

Henry James writes Henry James people, for me it's a bit like saying Damon Runyan writes realistic gangsters

xpost Agree!

Agree as a general principle, but I hate to deprive Isabel Archer and Kate Croy their femininity.

Henry James writes Henry James people, for me it's a bit like saying Damon Runyan writes realistic gangsters

― Chuck_Tatum, Wednesday, March 9, 2022

I think this is quite a good comment -- it points to the fact that authors don't simply write 'authentic women' or 'authentic men', or whatever, but constructs from their own sometimes very particular imaginations. And the most relevant dividing line might then be not M / F but author / author.

So a lot of HJ women, for instance, likely have more in common with HJ males than they do with ... well, Ian Fleming women, to take what may be an extreme comparison.

It would probably be worth having a separate thread for this, it’s an interesting topic

― mardheamac (gyac), Wednesday, March 9, 2022

I think it is, and a very tricky topic, and one on which it's probably easy to say the wrong thing or cause offence in some way.

A founding notion for me is that I would not start out with the certainty that there is a given female POV or a male POV, which a given writer can then get wrong or right - these notions have to be proved. Others may differ.

I have a lot of opinions about this, if nobody else starts a thread in the next two hours I may have to.

now I wonder what y'all think of Mr. Darcy, Dr. Lydgate, etc.

Another aspect of the issue is 'cognition bias' of some kind, possibly confirmation bias, ie ...

Almost every case of 'a woman writing a man', I know is a woman writing a man; and vice versa. I have very rarely been able to have a blind test on this. I haven't read 100 novels, without names or authorial genders attached, and guessed who wrote them. The information has always been baked in from the start. So do I really know what a 'woman's writing' feels like, in itself, separate from being told 'this piece of writing is by a woman' before I started reading it? No.

I think it is possible that in the case of such a blind test of 100 texts, many readers would not be able to tell the gender of the author. And this could well apply even if you threw in the additional factor under discussion, ie: gender X writes POV of gender Y.

And this is before you throw in another issue that I raised upthread, namely: if, hypothetically, there IS a way to write like a man, then a woman author of skill could learn what it is and execute it.

And all this is leaving aside the fact that gender itself is nowadays often discussed in more fluid terms than it used to be.

The tl;dr of this is that writing women by men is like anything else, if it’s invisible you’re doing well. There are weird edge cases like GRRM, where he writes a variety of women in interesting ways but then writes Dany thinking about the way her tits move around as she walks. Stephen King maybe a bit worse than GRRM on this. Then there’s authors where they write all people in a very cold, bloodless fashion such that the actual genders of the characters in question don’t matter.

Then you have the people who can’t write their own gender well. Damn.

gender itself is nowadays often discussed in more fluid terms than it used to be

the other thing that gets into the discussion more than it used to is that gender is performed: by actual people out in the world and therefore also by the characters that (good) fiction writers create to represent them -- authenticity of gender as performed authenticity of gender as fictionally recreated performed authenticity of gender

It is no woman’s writing. Although ladies have written histories, and travels, and warlike novels, to say nothing of books upon the different arts and sciences, no woman could have penned the “Autobiography of Jane Eyre.”

anticipated by Orlando and the Nighttown section of Ulysses

xpost

Thread up, am grateful for your contributions (please paste over if you like!)