![]() ![]() of Speculation.” It’s a novel that’s wonderfully hard to encapsulate, because it faces in many directions at the same time, and glitters with different emotional colors. ![]() Offill’s novel offers a kind of resistance report from within occupied territory.īut that description at once melodramatizes and banalizes “Dept. Art-making, unlike the great bourgeois panoply of family life, comes without society’s automatic sanction, and is in some ways hostile to it. Some of Ferrante’s interrogations find new expression in Offill’s original book: a young mother and ambitious writer, committed to her daughter and to her writing, tries to find energy and ambition for both she must claim for writing the authority of necessity that usually attends parenthood. I thought of Ferrante while reading Jenny Offill’s second novel, “Dept. Home, family, maternity are actually embraced and ideally escaped. ![]() Ah, to make them invisible, to no longer hear the demands of their flesh as commands more pressing, more powerful than those which came from mine.Īs often in Ferrante’s pleasingly austere writing, a savage ambivalence hangs over domestic life. But more brilliant was the brightness of the life outside them, new color, new bodies, new intelligence, a language to possess finally as if it were my true language, and nothing, nothing that seemed to me reconcilable with that domestic space from which they stared at me in expectation. ![]()
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