There is no success in Elena Ferrante’s world; one can become a bestselling author only to be overcome by writer’s block, an designer who ends us slaving away in a sausage factory. There is no friendship; your tender feelings for someone, your confidences in her, will disappear as soon as your circumstances change. There is no love; you can hope for a successful professor, or a rich man, or a man who doesn’t beat you or rape you, or a man who supports your family and raises your children with dedication and kindness, but probably not all of the above. And all of that, plus a man who makes your heart race? Forget it.There are no happy endings in Elena Ferrante’s world. Time passes, things change. There are never endings at all. Things happen one after another until you are murdered or die of consumption or disappear one day, entirely without a trace.There are books you read when you are happy to play at sadness, books that tug at your emotions and leave you cathartically crying. There are books you read when you are sad to play at happiness, books that deposit you in worlds not our own, where the colors are more vibrant and the friendships are deeper and the characters are characters in stories, not fragile carbon-based life forms who evolved sentience in what is now widely regarded by the forces of nature as a mistake.And then there are the books that don’t tug, that just tell. That are terrifying yet comforting; terrifying, because looking at the way things are is terrifying, and comforting because you’re not crazy, because someone else sees it too. Books that leave you neither crying nor laughing, but staring dazed at a train window too dark to see anything but your own reflection, reaching for Facebook or tumblr or anything that will let you go back to the way it was before realizing you can’t.
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