Tíživá láska – Ferrante Elena (2018)

After the extraordinary success of the tetralogy 'My Brilliant Friend', which is the latest prose work by Elena Ferrante, Czech readers are now receiving the author's debut, which, after a quarter of a century, proves how compact and authentic the creative journey of this remarkable author is. 'Troubling Love' already carries in its embryonic form all the basic motifs and characteristic features that will later be developed and deepened in the powerful flow of the tetralogy's narrative. It is therefore denser and thus more complex, as the author had to fit an entire world into a small space. The core of this world is Naples, and the protagonist is the narrator's mother, Amalia, who, however, is already dead at the time of the narration. She remains alive in the memory of her daughter Delia, whose storytelling is based on the complicated – both false and true – relationship between reality, individual and collective memory, and the story. The plot of 'Troubling Love' is almost detective-like. Amalia drowned in the sea under mysterious circumstances, and Delia naturally wants to find out what happened. However, as time goes on, the question that seems much more important to her is: Who was my mother? and the related need to ask: Who am I? In the dark story, the narrator's childhood trauma gradually comes to the surface, which...