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Elana Ferrante

Ferrante Fever

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The Neapolitan Novels: what’s all the fuss about? I’m into the third of the quadrilogy by this mysterious writer, and finding it repetitive, clichéd, and, to be honest, boring. It seems to me  standard chick-lit dressed up with some social history.  Apart from being set mostly in Naples from the fifties to the present time, these novels differ little from standard soap opera fare. I admit to feeling disappointed with the endless detailed descriptions of Lenu’s and Lila’s every mood, move and thought. The plot moves slowly, ever so slowly, which to me is rarely a problem as long as the novel brings to life characters with whom I can identify and care about. I’m afraid this is not the case here. I’ve listened to a talk by a Professor of Italian Literature, who praised the book for its scope and honesty. I asked her about the translation: was it true to the text? Yes, she assured me, Ann Goldstein is a consummate narrator, mirroring the author’s original Italian as closely as possible. So one can’t blame the translator for the slow pace, romantic clichés, and unnecessarily complicated cast list. Ferrante (not his/her real name) writes under  a psoudonym ‘to protect her family’s privacy and ward off her inner censor’. (London Review of Books, 8 January 2015). In one of the author’s rare statements, she/he says that personal publicity would defeat the aim of hr novels, which unlike today’s fraught attempts […]

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CAPRICCIO

Sylvia’s Last Letter

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  What do you think Sylvia might have written in that last letter? Sylvia Plath’s last days have been well documented, again and again giving us the same facts in the various non-fiction biographies. We know she wrote a letter just before she died, and asked her downstairs neighbour for stamps.. The letter, if it was found, has never been disclosed. […]

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SYLVIA PLATH

Ted Hughes and the Muse

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  Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath In his his introduction to ‘Poetry in the Making’, the then Poet Laureate of Britain had the following words of advice for those of us whose passion is Writing, be it poetry, prose, fiction, non-fiction, or something in between: Do you relate to these words? ‘You write interestingly only about the things that genuinely interest you. This is an infallible rule.. in writing, you have to be able to distinguish between those things about which you are merely curious –things you heard about last week or read about yesterday- and things which are a deep part of your life… So you say, ‘What part of my life would I die to be separated from?’ –Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making ‘It is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the doors of all those many mansions in the head and express something – perhaps not much, just something – of the crush of information that presses in on us from the way a crow flies over and the way a man walks and the look of a street and from what we did one day a dozen years ago. Words that will express something of the deep complexity that makes us precisely the way we are.’-Ted Hughes   Dina Davis Convenor Randwick Writers’ Group 📚 0418 115748

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Travel

Farewell Fiji: a salutary tale

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Flood in Nadi, April 2016 Have just returned from Fiji, where cyclones, floods and fierce storms are the order of the day. The locals on the beautiful island of Viti Levu  greet each new disaster with equanimity, surveying the damage and getting on with the job of repair as if it’s just another day. Their positive attitude leaves no room for railing against the fates; such courage in the face of adversity puts to shame those of us privileged first worlders who complain of a shower of rain. We visited the village of Vadra Vadra, near Ba, and were treated like royalty by my brother-in-law’s family. No sooner had we arrived, in stifling 40deg heat, than his mother and aunt set about cooking us roti and curry on a little kerosene stove. Friends and relatives in Sydney donated clothes, bed linen and other goods to this and another village, to replace those lost in the recent Cyclone Winston. Two days before we were to leave the rains came, and with the rise of the rivers our access to the airport in Nadi was blocked. Until, that is, my valiant son-in-law hired a 4wd truck. After missing two flights, we set off at 5am and against all advice drove through raging floods in Sigatoka,  to reach the airport. We’d never have made it without the guidance of a local man who needed a lift, and proceeded to point out where the water […]

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WRITING

Approaching a literary agent

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Australian Literary Agents’ Association Finding an Agent I’m a writer. How do I bring my work to the attention of a literary agent? First, read the information and advice on this page. You may wish to print it out for future reference. It is about three printed pages long. Second, look up a suitable agent from our list of member agents (click on the tab marked ‘Members’, above, to see the list), and phone them to check that they wish to see your work. Phoning first saves time and expense, because some kinds of writing are not of interest to some agents. Screenplays and plays are only dealt with by agents who specialise in that area, for example, and some agents may not wish to deal with children’s writing, and so on. Third, if an agent wants to look at your writing, they will generally ask you to post a copy of a one-to-two-page synopsis of your book, together with copies of some pages from one or two sample chapters (up to a maximum of fifty pages total), to their office. They usually do not want to see the whole work at first. Please note: send copies, not the originals. Always keep the originals in a safe place. Agents cannot be responsible for loss of material. Here are some further points to note. Please read them all carefully — it is very difficult to recover from an inadvertent bad first […]

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ASSIA WEVILL

Assia the Artist

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Few people know that Assia Gutmann Wevill was an accomplished artist in her own right. She painted brightly coloured miniatures of birds, fish, and flowers, and gave them to friends. She also drew the illustrations for many of Ted Hughes’s works. Sadly these have not survived As well as her talents in the visual arts, Assia was a gifted translator. […]

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ASSIA WEVILL

The Invisible Woman

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I’m reprinting this review here in acknowledgement of the role ‘Lover of Unreason’ has played in the writing of my novel, ‘Capriccio’. It has been my bible of facts, the scaffolding on which I’ve created the inner lives in fiction, of Assia, Ted and Sylvia. Eilat Negev herself has written to me that she and Yehuda often wished they’d had […]

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SYLVIA PLATH

Elizabeth Sigmund on Sylvia Plath, reprinted from the Guardian

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Elizabeth Sigmund was a friend and neighbour of Sylvia’s when she and Ted first moved to Devon. A year earlier, she had offered her country home to the Hugheses after hearing a broadcast on the BBC, in which they disclosed that their London apartment was so small, Ted had to work on a card table in the tiny entrance hall. The Guardian, Friday 23 April 1999 10.56 AEST. Last modified on Sunday 10 January 2016 In 1963, the poet Sylvia Plath, distraught at the break-up of her marriage to Ted Hughes, committed suicide. Six years later, Hughes faced more tragedy when his mistress Assia Wevill – who had lured him away from Plath – killed herself and their four-year-old daughter Shura. Elizabeth Sigmund, a close friend of Sylvia Plath, prompted by the Guardian’s account of Wevill’s death (Saturday Review, 10/4/99) recalls the aftermath of Plath’s suicide and the terrible events surrounding the death of Assia and Shura.In March 1963, I went with my young daughter, Meg, to visit Sylvia Plath’s small children in the flat in Fitzroy Road, Primrose Hill, where their mother had killed herself weeks earlier. I had been told that Ted Hughes’s aunt, Hilda, was looking after the children, four-year-old Frieda and one-year-old Nicholas. Before gassing herself, Sylvia had left food and drink for her children and made sure they were safe in their bedroom. When Meg and I arrived we found that Frieda and Nicholas were being cared for […]

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