Elsewhere Ferrante has referred to these hidden depths as frantumaglia, “an unstable landscape, an infinite aerial or aquatic mass of debris that appears to the I, brutally, as its true and unique inner self.”12 In the novels, Lila has brief spells of terror when she perceives the margins of the people around her dissolving, exposing their greed, their ferocity, their meanness; spells of chaos and destruction when—to borrow Ferrante’s metaphor—the river rises and floods the earth with “excruciating anguish … a vortex like-fracturing of material living and dead.”
