Elena Ferrante Seen as a Writer of "Competition"

I was scanning through the New York Times  Sunday Magazine today and came across an interview with Marilyn Minter, an artist who once painted women's public hair for "Playboy Magazine," only to have the magazine ultimately decide not to print the images.

Now they are hanging on a wall at the Brooklyn Museum as one part of a major retrospective of Minter's work entitled "Pretty/Dirty."





In any event, in the interview, Minter was asked to name some other artists that have caught her attention.  In her own field, the visual arts, she mentioned Cindy Sherman, which is not a surprise. But she also mentioned Italian author Elena Ferrante.

"I think she (Ferrante) writes about competition better than anybody," Minter said.

Having read Ferrante's massive "Neapolitan Quartet" with somewhat mixed feelings last year, I was struck by that comment.

One of the things that I have complained about is that Ferrante's series of four books, set largely in Naples, is strewn with one love triangle after another to the point where I got tired of all the histrionics that go along with such relationships -- jealously, bad-mouthing, back-biting etc. etc.

But Minter is correct: triangular relationships are, indeed, all about competition and when Ferrante's characters storm about within them, and sometimes in public, she probably knows what she is talking about -- in the Southern Italian context at any rate.

And, perhaps more importantly, the fundamental theme of the book -- that of friendship between two rather different women -- is seeped in competition, too.

The bottom line: Minter's observation is very helpful.