Though the novels are billed as tales of female friendship, friendship always skates on the edge of irony—intimacy is inseparable from violation. Lenù is the one making art out of Lila’s life, but she suspects that Lila has driven her to do it, that the pleasure she derives from writing and reading is spiked by the pain of submitting to another’s will. It is a fitting model for the relationship Ferrante’s readers have with her novels, which are universally celebrated for their addictiveness. One is pulled, sometimes dragged, along by Ferrante’s prose with an intensity that seems at once
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