Occasional ideas

The book mosaic Occasional Ideas consists of fifty-one diverse pieces drawing on the author's experience and poetics, intuition and her own life. Friendship, first love, climate change, jealousy, Feminism, our relationship with plants, The secrets of a lasting partnership or beauty are some of the big themes, that Elena Ferrante wrote about every week for a year at the request of The Guardian, translated into English by Ann Goldstein. They come together in this intimate, imaginative and intelligent ensemble, in which the famous Italian writer invites readers to think, shared memories and ideas and experienced strong emotions and stepped out of the river of conventions, as in her extraordinary novels.

Elena Ferrante, who has been publishing under this pseudonym since her first novel, Tíživá láska (Czech: PROSTOR 2018), has become famous all over the world, especially for her tetralogy Geniální přítelkyně (Czech: PROSTOR 2016-2018). The worldwide success of the saga has prompted an intensified search for her identity, which has not yet been revealed.

Whoever Elena Ferrante is, she is currently ranked by critics as one of Italy's greatest living authors, and in 2016 Time magazine listed her among the 100 most influential people in the world. Her narrative mastery is not based on narrative experimentation, but on the riveting power of her account of the most basic human emotional bonds. This theme appears in all of her prose works to date, in addition to the aforementioned novels Dny opuštění (Czech: PROSTOR 2019), Dark Daughter and the children's book Beach at Night, published by PROSTOR in autumn 2019.

HBO aired an eight-part series based on the first part of the Genius Girlfriends tetralogy in 2018, with a second season in 2020 and more to come in the following years. Her novels A Troubled Love and Days of Abandonment have also been adapted into films.

Andrea Ucini is an Italian conceptual illustrator who lives and works in Denmark. He studied classical piano and composition at the Academia Musicale in Florence. Apart from music, his other passion has always been drawing, which he has pursued professionally and for which he has won prestigious prizes. He is a regular contributor to various periodicals, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian. For the latter, he illustrated a weekly column for the newspaper, which was run by Elena Ferrante during 2018.

The unconscious is a powerful red thread that connects these occasional ideas into a unique system whose main themes are identity, the tension between fact and fiction, and the power of femininity.

Raffaella Silipo, La Stampa Tuttolibri

Elena Ferrante lets the reader into her personal space. But be careful, don't expect any sentiment, he writes with a very precise, very precise style: just like in the much-acclaimed novels. There is no need to seduce the reader with sentences written for effect, with "impressive metaphors, memorable similes". It is essential to "educate", that is, to change inwardly, to mediate a fruitful transmission of thought. To enter, even at the cost of violating intimacy, into the human mind and through this sometimes painful process to capture the meaning of actions and choices.

Maria Anna Patti, La Repubblica - Robinson

After the abundance of words, plot twists, and subplots of the saga that has made Elena Ferrante one of the world's most widely read writers, these short texts return the most disciplined and accomplished aspect of her writing to the enthusiastic reader.

Giulio Milani, Internazionale

The occasional ideas are a more holistic and coherent picture of the author's inner world and everyday life - her desires, fears, ambitions, failures. Ferrante seemed to peek out from behind the curtain of the pages, revealing a piece of herself.

Reading in Translation

Ferrant