Troubling Love Book

An unpleasant and disturbing read. Everything feels ugly here. Postwar Naples with its dirty streets and unkempt flats, overwhelming poverty and general aura of failure. Women subjected to all kind of abuse and domestic violence, men shown mostly as malicious and meanspirited individuals.

Ferrante seems to write the same story over and over again. I gave already up trying to understand the phenomena of her writing. I gather it's her unbending honesty, raw and unpolished, that unmitigated lack of sentimentality in portraying of surrounding reality endeared her so many ardent readers. She doesn't bother to be nice. The novel feels nasty. And love feels the same. Husbands are abusive, lovers lecherous and descriptions of internal scenes to put it mildly feel rather awkward.

The novel doesn't disappoint the readers accustomed to Ferrante's style and themes but to tell the truth neither enraptures them. Troubling love was her debut but it already heralds all motives the author pursues in further novels. Not sure it's the best place to start with her writing, though. It definitely left me with kind of uneasiness. Her style is not very refined, I find it quite clumsy in fact so fans of beautifully crafted sentences let better seek them elsewhere. But she has kind of magnetic power that still draws me in. Though I didn't decide yet what it is.