I have just finished the 4 part novel series - Neapolitan Novels. It was quite moving.
As I was reading I noticed that Elena Ferante gave to the brilliant characters a way of constantly finding connections between things. I will just give a few examples as it is some of the same as what we talk about on here.
In the Story of a New Name she writes:
It was on those occasions that I realised how her relationship with books had changed… She seemed not to realise that her capacity to learn effortlessly remained intact. But I knew. I saw for example that chemistry so boring for me provided in her that narrow look, and her few observations awakened me from my apathy, excited me. I saw that after half a page of the philosophy textbook she was able to find surprising connections between Anaxoragas, the order that the intellect imposes on the chaos of things, and Mendeleev’s tables… Once she closed the book abruptly and said with annoyance, ‘That’s enough.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because I’ve had it, it’s always the same story: inside something small, there’s something even smaller that wants to leap out, and outside something large there’s always something larger that wants to keep it a prisoner. I’m going to cook’.
…
Lines in that article… did not require great expertise, only an inspired moment of contact between things that were very distant from one another…
…
Pietro had a prodigious memory: he knew how to connect texts that were very unlike one another and he quoted them as if he were looking at them.
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There are many other beautiful lines all through the 4 part series. And giving the references above wont spoil it for you.
I want to treasure this book like they did to the old classic texts and turn it into a scheme for use. I can create a list of the characters, or a palace of the different phases of the book. If you count up all the characters, each with a different role and personality, there are 15 to 20 or so major characters. But the supporting cast is much larger and it would be nice to be able to bring them to mind.
What do you do for films or books you cherish? And what to turn into a scheme or hook for later?