Elena Ferrante is an Italian novelist. EF is actually a mysterious pseudonym. I read the English translation. I’ve seen it called a novel but I’d call it a novella. It’s very short (140 pages) so a quick read.
It’s about Leda, a 48-yr old divorced English Literature university professor whose two twentysomething daughters just moved to Toronto, where their father lives. She decides to take a beach vacation in southern Italy. She expects to feel lonely but feels liberated. The New Yorker sums it up well by calling it “a brutally frank novel of maternal ambivalence” And it is a perfect novel for me to read while reading my own mother’s journals. I’m going to loan it to my sister.
I think if you liked The Awakening by Kate Chopin or anything by Virginia Woolf, you might like this.
ETA that Maggie Gyllanhaal directed a movie based on this novel in 2021. I hear the movie is very good. But because it is a Netflix film, it will be a while before I’ll get to see it. So I read the novel instead, for now.
