Friday, March 11, 2016

My hero / Elena Ferrante by Margaret Drabble

Naples in the early 1960's

My hero: 

Elena Ferrante by Margaret Drabble

‘The Story of the Lost Child’ has just been longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker International prize

Margaret Drabble
Fri 11 Mar 2016

E
lena Ferrante’s novels have a driving and unconventional narrative power that has gripped readers across a wide cultural range. Mostly set in Naples, they evoke a city of beauty and violence, and tell stories of aspiration, defeat, birth, sex, death and ambition – thrillers without the vulgarity of contrived plots and sensational crimes.

They do have their literary contrivances; her acclaimed quartet abounds in cleverly deployed postmodern devices such as alter egos, lost texts, recurrent motifs and destroyed manuscripts, but the human interest is so overwhelming that we read on, volume after volume, hardly noticing the sophistication of the narration.
The books are passionate rather than playful, and, unusually, the last of the quartet The Story of the Lost Child, which has just been longlisted for the Man Booker International prize, is the best. She writes with embarrassing frankness about female sexuality and its contradictory impulses, describing jealousy and ugly ordinary sex, particularly in her deeply melancholy The Days of Abandonment, with an unprecedented and shaming veracity that outdoes Doris Lessing. Is she a feminist or a sociologist, or both?
Reading her novels is to sweep through Italian and European history, through many decades of embattled politics, from the shadows of postwar fascism in the 40s and 50s, through the insurgencies and assassinations of the Red Brigade in the 70s, to the cynicism and materialism of the so-called end of history. Her characters are alive and full of impassioned contradictions; they grow old as we grow old. They betray themselves and others as we betray ourselves. Elena Greco and her friend Lila, the one who got away and the one who stays, play out an entangled drama through time. Elena is, like her creator (whoever she may be) an intensely ambitious writer: she is confused, engaged, ardent, brilliant. The range is huge: a lifetime’s oeuvre delivered in a decade.
THE GUARDIAN





2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016



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