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 strange, disturbing, confusing, magnetic, compulsive, and often horribly ecstatic pleasure of reading Ferrante’s fiction is in fact situated in the ungraspable nature of its perturbations. The clearly defined aspects of structural convergences, descriptive writing, character work—these small formal satisfactions drift limply atop the vast, seething unknowability of the real real that strains to break through these artificial constraints, the irrepressible and irresistible disorder that Ferrante calls frantumaglia that churns under the shaky scaffolding of the knowable or sayable. To me, it becomes increasingly clear that the dangerous height of my pleasure in reading Ferrante is the feeling that she, and we with her, are on the cusp of disintegration of the safely contained forms of fiction and of life. To give yourself over to the Neapolitan novels is to feel at once like you are wholly enclosed within the world of the books (both within their surprising unities of place, action, and time, and within their luxuriant, multivolume bulk) and like that entire, encompassing world is always on the brink of utter rupture and dissolution.