Ferrante again: "Troubling Love" and, briefly, Anthony Marra

     Yes--Ferrante again--her first novel, "Troubling Love," which was also made into a film. The novel exhibits all the characteristics of the Neapolitan novels except one: it is only about 130 pages in a fairly small format--two or three sessions and you are through. There is a first-person narrator and considerable introspection, and the locale is down-market Naples, dirty and crumbling.
     The narrator is Delia, whose mother, Amalia, has drowned in strange circumstances. Delia returns to Naples, her childhood home, to attend the funeral, and she sets off on an investigation of the mysterious days preceding her mother's death This becomes a re-living of her childhood and her relationship, in particular, with her mother, who was physically abused by her father. And did Delia, as child, contribute to that abuse by reporting on Amalia's possible contacts with another man?
     Delia discovers that Amalia seems to have had a late-life romance with a elderly suitor, a fetishist who has collected all the drowned woman's underwear in a suitcase.
      And in this quest to reconstruct her mother's final days, Delia not only revisits her childhood, but also in the words of one reviewer "disentangles the knot of lies, passions, and memories that bind mother and daughter."
     I enjoyed it.
     Flash forward: I am nearly halfway through a fascinating book with the long title--"A Constellation of Vital Phenomena," by Anthony Marra, a writer I had never heard of. The book is a great achievement of writing and research, and so far (half-way) it has kept me fascinated. It is set in Chechnya, and you will be helped by googling 'Chechnya' and reading the history. Marra has also published another book, which I will get hold of--"The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories, Music, Culture and Travel."  Marra went to Landon School, here in Washington.