SUNDAY, MARCH 27 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ EE E15
are probably at work. More gener-
ally, I believe that the sense I have
of writing ... has to do with the
satisfaction of staying beautifully
within the margins and, at the
same time, with the impression of
loss, of waste, because of that suc-
cess.”
The idea that adhering to form,
as beautifully as Ferrante does in
her celebrated novels, simulta-
neously signals the abandonment
of all that’s left outside that form is
a truth known to anyone who’s
ever had the impulse to write. It’s
Ferrante’s distinct articulation of
that loss here — the voice and tone
whose singularity she under-
mines in the other lectures — that
makes the experience freshly mel-
ancholy. The other three lectures
in “In the Margins” should only
hold the attention of those fans
who will read anything and every-
thing by that manufactured con-
struct known as “Elena Ferrante,
author.” But “Pain and Pen” has
the extended poignancy that the
great sportswriter, Red Smith,
compressed into one deathless re-
mark: “Writing is easy. All you
have to do is sit down at the
typewriter, cut open a vein, and
bleed.”
Maureen Corrigan, who is the book
critic for the NPR program “Fresh Air,”
teaches literature at Georgetown
University.
mate whose resistance to the liter-
ary status quo also opened her to
charges of gimmickry. In her sly
1934 memoir, “The Autobiogra-
phy of Alice B. Toklas,” Stein — the
Great Trickster Mother of Mod-
ernism — appropriated the voice
and life story of Toklas, her inti-
mate life partner, as a way of writ-
ing her own autobiography from
the outside, as it were. Following
Stein’s lead, Ferrante talks of tak-
ing a sledgehammer to not only
the “manufactured image” of the
author but also the prefabricated
constructs of language and genre
— what she refers to as “the great
containers of literary writing, ...
[that] instead are a death trap for
our intention to write “truthfully.”
Are you taking notes? There’s a
whiff of the graduate school semi-
nar room, especially about the
first three lectures here. (The final
piece is a more straightforward
appreciation of Dante, or, rather
Beatrice, the character Ferrante
regards as Dante’s “boldest crea-
tion.”) Granted, these lectures
were written to be delivered to
scholars and other strains of intel-
lectuals, but they feel dated, as if
they were written in the late 1970s
or early ’80s, when literary theo-
rists were still parsing the epipha-
nies of Roland Barthes’s famous
1967 essay, “The Death of the Au-
thor,” and exposing the internal
contradictions of literary form. In-
is a slim collection of four public
lectures on writing and literature
that were presented in Italy last
year — three at the University of
Bologna and one at a conference of
Dante scholars. Note my use of the
passive voice: “were presented.”
Ferrante did not deliver them in
person — of course. Instead, they
were given voice by an actress
playing Ferrante and by a Dante
scholar. This contrivance served
only to highlight the absence of
Ferrante herself, thus keeping the
audience’s attention fixed on the
figure of the missing “writer-hero”
she disdains. (The author photo
for “In the Margins” is a postcard-
perfect image of Naples.)
It’s tough to prevent such ex-
treme aesthetic convictions, no
matter how sincerely embraced,
from devolving into gimmicks. In
the second lecture here, called
“Histories I,” Ferrante ruminates
on Gertrude Stein, a writer/soul
BY MAUREEN CORRIGAN
E
lena Ferrante is, as all the
world knows by now, the
pseudonym for the elusive
author of, among other
books, “The Lost Daughter,” which
was recently made into a film di-
rected by Maggie Gyllenhaal, and
the four extraordinary “Neapoli-
tan novels,” the first of which —
“My Brilliant Friend” — is now an
HBO series. Ferrante champions
the view that, as she said in a 2015
interview with the Paris Review,
the “author” is merely a “manufac-
tured image” of a “writer-hero”:
“There is no work of literature
that is not the fruit of tradition, of
many skills, of a sort of collective
intelligence. We wrongfully di-
minish this collective intelligence
when we insist on there being a
single protagonist b ehind every
work of art.”
Her new book, “In the Margins,”
E lena Ferrante’s
latest is redolent
o f seminars past
EUROPA EDITIONS
A photo of Naples provided by the publisher in lieu of an author photo. Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym for the author, whose books include the celebrated “Neapolitan novels.” Her identity is closely guarded.
ciles the fiction of the individual
“writer-hero” with the politics of
identity and heightened demands
for more diversity of representa-
tion in literature.
For those who can’t get
enough of Ferrante, even
the pedantic Ferrante
who prevails here, the
first lecture, called “Pain
and Pen” is the best of the
lot because it feels
(please don’t snicker at
my naivete) the most per-
sonal. Here, Ferrante
summons up the image
of the kind of notebooks
that once were given to
children practicing their
alphabet. Ever slippery,
Ferrante focuses on the
penmanship efforts of a
young girl she says she’s
“fond of” whom she calls
“Cecilia.” Describing Ce-
cilia’s attempts to keep
her letters within the
lines causes Ferrante to
recall her own early ef-
forts. (Or, maybe Cecilia
is a younger incarnation of Ferran-
te — identity is malleable, right?).
Toward the end of this section,
Ferrante makes an unexpected
confession:
“In my longing to write, starting
in early adolescence, both the
threat of those red lines ... and the
desire and fear of violating them
deed, although Ferrante presents
her views as somewhat revolu-
tionary, this passage from “His-
tories I,” reads like a throwback to
the prevailing critical theories of
that time:
“We have to give up
the idea that writing mi-
raculously releases a
voice of our own, a tonal-
ity of our own: in my
view that is a lazy way of
talking about writing.
Writing is, rather, enter-
ing into an immense
cemetery where every
tomb is waiting to be
profaned. ... Thus when I
talk about my “I” who
writes, I should immedi-
ately add that I’m talking
about my “I” who has
read. ... And I should em-
phasize that every book
read carries within itself
a host of other writers
that, consciously or in-
advertently, I’ve taken
in.”
Perhaps it would be
more revelatory to hear Ferrante’s
responses to contemporary criti-
cal views that underscore the con-
nection between personal identity
and art. I’d like to know, for in-
stance, what she thinks about the
censoring of books because of the
misdeeds of their authors. I’m cu-
rious about how Ferrante recon-
IN THE MARGINS
On the
Pleasures of
Reading and
Writing
By Elena
Ferrante.
Translated from
the Italian by Ann
Goldstein
Europa Editions.
112 pp. $21.95
Book World
Shepherd, also the author of
“The Book of M,” nails the sense of
deep-seated, profound connec-
tion and love between a small
group of people drawn together
by shared experience and inter-
est, creating an intense familial
bond. The Cartographers met in
college and stayed connected
through doctoral study and work,
pushing each other to far greater
heights than they’d have man-
aged academically and personally
on their own. “I thought we were
going to be friends forever,” one of
the Cartographers recalls. “I
thought nothing could tear us
apart.” The tragedy of the book is
what happens to that bond — and
why.
“The Cartographers” is both
beautiful and intellectual, and
Shepherd sticks the landing in a
deeply satisfying fashion, echoing
Edmund Spenser: “For there is
nothing lost, that may be found, if
sought.”
Vivian Shaw is the author of
“Strange Practice,” “Dreadful
Company” and “Grave Importance.”
that everything they have done,
and everything Nell’s father did to
her on that awful afternoon, has
been to keep Nell safe. The gas
station map hides — in plain sight
— a secret valuable enough to kill
for, which throws into
question the entire
structure of reality: Is
the act of printing a
thing on a map enough
to bring it into exis-
tence? Could drawing a
door, or a room, or a
staircase on a map create
one?
Nell is drawn into an
increasingly dangerous
sequence of events that
sheds light on the se-
crets within secrets that
surround her mother’s
death decades earlier. In
the process of confront-
ing and addressing what really
happened and the covert, de-
cades-long quest to find a way
back to what was lost, the deci-
sion is up to Nell whether to
change fate or to be swept along
with it.
DESTROYED or STOLEN.
As Nell wades further into her
investigation, with the help of her
ex-boyfriend and fellow scholar,
Felix (who now works at tech
giant Haberson Global, refining
algorithms for the pre-
dictive, constantly
evolving, interactive
Haberson Map), she re-
connects one by one
with the members of a
mysterious — and sinis-
ter — organization
known as the Cartogra-
phers. They turn out to
be friends of Nell’s par-
ents from their univer-
sity days who remember
Nell as a toddler. Shep-
herd gives us the back-
story in individual
flashbacks from the per-
spectives of several Car-
tographers, handling the segues
so smoothly that the shifts back to
Nell’s current point of view slip
past like silk.
At first the huddled secrecy of
the group seems excessive, but as
events unfold, it becomes clear
Nell Young’s passion is cartog-
raphy. Intelligent and accom-
plished, she’d been poised to fol-
low in her father’s footsteps as the
second Dr. Young, dedicated to
the study and restoration of his-
toric maps at the New York Public
Library. That career, along with
Nell’s relationship with a fellow
cartographer, was shattered in a
screaming argument with her fa-
ther seven years ago over the
authenticity of three maps. Fired
from the library and blacklisted
in academia, she’s reduced to
photoshopping water stains onto
prints of historic maps at Classic
Maps and Atlases™ in Brooklyn
to make rent.
Then her father is found dead
in his office at the library, and in a
secret compartment of his desk,
Nell finds a battered, 90-year-old
gas station road map — one of the
very questionable maps that had
sent her packing seven years ago.
The mystery deepens when she
discovers that this map is an
incredibly rare and sought-after
collector’s item that’s described
by other institutions as MISSING,
“The Cartographers” explores
these questions with deep, vivid
intensity; it will make you think
twice about the power of paper
maps, especially in a world where
they’ve been supplanted by elec-
tronic devices.
BY VIVIAN SHAW
P
eng Shepherd’s “The Car-
tographers” is, at its heart,
about three things: family,
found and otherwise; how
much of one’s life can be built and
balanced on a single lie; and the
transformative nature of cartog-
raphy. Its examination of this last
aspect is what takes the book
from an enjoyable, fast-paced
(and fantastical) thriller to some-
thing you want to put down and
think about before rereading it —
snarling viciously at anyone who
tries to pick it up before you can
get that second pass. It’s brilliant.
One of the triumphs of “The
Cartographers” is the exploration
of what it means to make a map.
Does the act of surveying, mea-
suring, drafting and drawing the
map affect the landscape it repre-
sents? Is it possible to map some-
thing without altering it in the
process? How accurate can any
map be, given that it only repre-
sents a snapshot of that land-
scape at one point in time, and to
what extent does this matter?
In ‘The Cartographers,’ maps provide a medium for mind-bending intrigue
THE
CARTOGRAPHERS
Peng Shepherd
William Morrow.
400 pp. $27.99
RACHEL CRITTENDEN
“The Cartographers” is Peng
Shepherd’s second novel.
