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[...] In Frantumaglia, Ferrante writes that, “We are heterogeneous fragments that, thanks to impressions of unity—elegant figures, beautiful form— stay together despite their arbitrary and contradictory nature” (FR, 368). The truly marvelous unpleasure of reading Ferrante has to do with the fact th…

The pleasure one finds in the supposed perfection of novelistic form, in the precise and proportional lineaments of a world made by, say, Henry James, is the very opposite of the visceral pleasure-unpleasure I find in Ferrante’s writing, where “everything take[s] shape and then loses its shape.” Li…

this incipient destruction of form is itself a distinctly formal pleasure, ripe for exegesis

But I don’t think that these superficial delights, redolent though they are of the standard practices and conventions of what some critics might brush off as mere pleasure reading, are at all the things that generate the most intense pleasure in reading Ferrante—at least, not for me. No, the strang…

the surprise comes in the bathetic letdown of their failures