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Sometimes the way we get turned on to politics is to get turned on. From Plato’s Symposium through Wilhelm Reich and his sexualrevolutionary heirs, a compelling line of thought holds that if you want people to develop a political consciousness, it’s not a bad idea to begin with the erotic—sex, wine…

What first got me hooked on the Neapolitan novels, almost from the start of My Brilliant Friend, was the way in which the many things Lenu and Lila fervently desire—books, money, power, knowledge, experience, boys, sex, beautiful objects, political change, respect, escape, superiority, each other—r…

Where Ferrante’s guidance seems most apparent is in Costanzo’s attempt to make the depth and disorder of a character’s consciousness visible, a technique he and Ferrante both refer to as “acquiring density.” Density works by cutting against psychological realism, casting off deterministic explanati…

[...] 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…