disturbing love

Author: Elena Ferrante

My mother drowned on the night of May 23rd, my birthday.
Elena Ferrante begins her narrative with this harsh, shocking phrase, reminiscent of the opening of Kafka's Metamorphosis and Camus's The Stranger. The heroine then delves into investigative research to find out the causes of that death.
However, we do not lose sight of the basic idea of ​​the mother-daughter relationship, the daughter’s possession of her mother, and the mother’s extension into her daughter’s body.
Disturbing love is a woman's love for her mother, which the author describes in her book Frantomalia as an intimate, fleshly love mixed with fleshly aversion.
It is sometimes embodied in the choice of clothing because it is the vessel that will contain that dual being, and sometimes it clashes with the daughter’s relationship with her father, who competes with her for the mother’s love and is the disturbing opponent according to the Freudian definition.
This novel is the story of a woman's disappearance and a woman's search for a trace of a woman.
Anyone who has read My Amazing Friend with such passion will find the roots of the quartet here and sense the beginnings of the dissolution of the margins as well.
Disturbing Love is the first novel published by the pseudonymous writer.