Troubling Love

On May 23, Delia turns 45. And on the very same day her mother, Amalia, dies under mysterious circumstances: two boys the next morning find her swaying body in the water. Delia is forced to travel to Naples—the city where her youth passed under suffocating atmosphere, and to which she would like never to return. Her attempts to understand the circumstances of her mother’s death lead Delia on a journey into the farthest corners of her subconscious, pulling her into her own past, where a whole heap of heavy and painful memories is kept.

As a result, truth intertwines with fiction, the past with the present, and Delia sees her mother’s figure in a completely unexpected way—allowing her to find the answer to who Delia is, in fact, really. Elena Ferrante’s first novel by the most mysterious writer of our time and author of the legendary "Neapolitan Quartet" is here in Russian for the first time. The novel "Love in a Hard Place" was first published in 1992 and immediately attracted close attention from critics and readers.

This is extraordinarily subtle, psychologically precise prose about the relationship between mother and daughter—relationships that exist only in the space of memory. Amalia, the mother of the novel’s main heroine, dies under mysterious circumstances, which forces Delia, her daughter, to search for answers to questions long forgotten and, as a result, to completely rethink her past. As always with Ferrante, both female images are contradictory and ambiguous; their actions and thoughts are the result of the simultaneous influence of a thousand different forces, pulling in different directions. In the novel you can already sense Ferrante’s signature style—surprisingly poetic yet relentlessly accurate, balancing on the edge of what’s permissible. Ferrante proves herself a master of vivid, almost cruel scenes in their documentary exactness, which reveal the characters’ nature and state better than the longest descriptions and monologues.

And, of course, the main action of the novel unfolds in Naples—Naples of poor neighborhoods, with its dirty streets, overcrowded houses, and suffocating trams. Naples we come to love more and more with each new Ferrante novel.