Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series of 4 novels is so wildly popular that I probably shouldn’t write anything about them. The New York Times says 2 of them in the top 100 books of the 21st Century (and includes another Ferrante novel making her 3% of the top 100 books, pretty impressive). Plenty of ink has already been spilled. So this will be a short and mostly personal reflection.
I had heard of Ferrante and these novels, but never considered them until I was headed to Naples this summer on holiday. What a good idea to read something entertaining and topical. So I launched into them this summer before and after visiting Italy. In the end, we skipped Naples in favor of Sorrento and Pompei, which was fine. But I won’t miss Naples again if I ever get the chance.
There are many wonderful aspects to these novels, but they also don’t fit easily into categories or concepts. They are the story of a friendship, or perhaps a kind of life-long love affair between two girls. There’s a kind of interiority that is fascinating to this story telling — but told from one side. The rivalry, jealousy, solidarity, respect and love are compelling. And the core of the relationship, which evolves but is never fully revealed, as their lives progress and spin.
They are also a kind of story about Naples and the indigenous life there — from the 1950s to the 1990s. Ferrante never really treats it as an anthropology, so it’s a very partial explication. But very interesting anyhow. The culture — including the honor-based ethics and violence. The political ferment of the 1960s and 70s in Italy. The class distinctions which can be subtle at the bottom of the scale. The use of “dialect” versus Italian.
Although the narrator is in the thick of it, the novels only treat the hot politics of the era somewhat obliquely. The fascists, the mafia, the leftists were all in hot conflict across Italy. The narrator is generally aligned and married into leftists. Her longtime lover is a socialist and his politics are formed early — in school. But she rarely discusses the substance of the issues, the debate and mostly refers to them in oblique forms, almost aesthetics. This is true even when her friends become fugitives (a la Red Brigade) and commit political violence. Or when close friends — including her husband — are victimized with beatings (presumably from rightists, although it’s not always clear). But she describes a world that is interesting and different.
For a country — and a city — so famous for food, it hardly features in her writing. She refers to cooking, to meals, but almost never mentions what is cooked or eaten. Many strange elisions.
The novels are compelling — love, friendship, betrayals, the complicated juggling of love, work, friendship, parenting. But the story disappears at the end. The whole venture begins with the disappearance of her friend, Lina. And the novels are a recounting of their lives and relationship. But the mystery of her disappearance is never resolved, nor is there a clear moral for the story. The narrator spends the last few pages trying to make sense of it all, but doesn’t succeed. And that can be fine — what does friendship mean? Does it have to mean anything? If your own identity and history are so interwoven, do you need a final assessment? Is one owed? To one another or to the reader?
The ending is a disappointment, but mainly in form. The quality of the novels led me to think there would be a stronger finish. But the stories themselves and the writing were strong enough without a clean ending or summation. And there is a kind of haunting that pervades — the mystery of the “other”, and of friendship, and of identity. The pride and guilt of leaving the other behind. The recognition that you can’t or won’t leave your past, your home, fully.
There are many themes and lots of material for analysis. I can imagine dozens of feminist theses about the books and the perspective of women making their way through patriarchy. Lina and Elena, their dolls, their struggles and accommodations with the patriarchy, their resourcefulness and feminist solidarity. I won’t try, except to say that I see it and it’s good.
All the more confounding that we don’t know who Ferrante is, and there’s a strong case that the author is actually a man.
Great quotes:
The story of a New Name
Chapter 17:
“Already on the way home I began to worry both about her and about me. If Stefano killed her? If Anotonio killed me? I was racked by anxiety, I walked quickly, in the dusty heat, along Sunday streets that were beginning to empty as lunchtime approached. How difficult it was to find one’s way, how difficult it was not to violate any of the incredibly detailed male regulations. Lila, perhaps based on secret calculations of her own, perhaps only out of spite, had humiliated her husband by going to flirt in front of everyone…”
Chapter 34:
“He was absolutely the first person to show me in a practical sense how comfortable it is to arrive in a strange, potentially hostile environment, and discover that you have been preceded by your reputation, that you don’t have to do anything to be accepted, that your name is known, that everyone knows about you, and it’s the others, the strangers, who must strive to win your favor and not you theirs. Used as was to the absence of advantages, that unforeseen advantage gave me energy, an immediate self-confidence….”
Chapter 108:
“I have learned the methodical persistence of the researcher who checks even the commas, that, yes, and I proved it during exams, or with the thesis that I was writing. But in fact I remained naive, even if almost too cultured, I didn’t have the armor to advance serenely as they did. Professor Airota was an immortal god who had given his children magical weapons before the battel. Mariarosa was invicible. And pietro perfect in his overcultivated courtesy. I? I could only remain near them, shine in their radiance.”
These Who Leave and Those Who Stay
Chapter 1
“Every year, in other words, it seemed to me worse. In that season of rains, the city had cracked yet again, an entire building had buckled onto one side, like a person who, sitting in an old chair, leans on the worm-eaten arm and it gives way. Dead, wounded. And shouts, blows, cherry bombs. The city seemed to harbor in its guts a fury that couldn’t get out and therefore eroded it from the inside, or erupted in pustules on the surface, swollen with venom against everyone, children, adults, old people, visitors from other cities, Americans from NATO, tourists of every nationality, the Neapolitans themselves. How could one endure in that place of disorder and danger, on the outskirts in the center on the hills, at the foot of Vesuvius?”
Chapter 49
“Without exaggeration, I could hypothesize that even the publication of my book was part of an emergency plan intended to make me presentable to their world. But the fact remained, incontrovertible, that they had accepted me, that I was about to marry Pietro, with their consent, that I was about to enter a protective family, a sort of well-fortified castle from which I could proceed without fear or to which I could retreat if I were in danger. So it was urgent that I get used to that new membership, and above all I had to be conscious of it. I was no longer a small match-seller almost down to the last match: I had won for myself a large supply of matches. And so-I suddenly understood — I could do for Lila much more than I had calculated on doing.”
Chapter 77
“Mariarosa’s provocative remarks and the invitation of her friends led me to fish out from under a pile of books those pamphlets. Adele had given me long before. I carried them around in my purse, I read them outside, under the gray sky of late winter. First, intrigued by the title, I read an essay entitled We Spit on Hegel, I read it while Elsa slept in her carriage and Dede, in coat, scarf, and woolen hat, talked to her doll in a low voice. Every sentence struck me, every word, and above all the bold freedom of thought. I forcefully underlined many of the sentences, I made exclamation points, vertical strokes. Spit on Hegel. Spit on the culture of men, spit n Marx, on Engels on Lenin. And on historical materialism. And on Freud. And on psychoanalysis, and penis envy. And on marriage, on family. And on Nazism, on Stalinism, on terrorism. And on war. And on the class struggle. And on the dictatorshiop of the proletariat. And on socialism. And on Communism. And on the trap of equality. And on all the manifestations of patriarchal culture. and on all its institutional forms. Resist the waters of female intelligence. Deculturate. Disacculturate, starting with maternity, don’t give children to anyone. Get rid of the master-slave dialectic. Rip inferiority from our brains. Restore women to themselves. Don’t create antithesis. Move on another plane in the name of one’sown difference. The university doesn’t free women but copletes their repression. Against wisdom. While men devote themselves to undertakings in space, life for women on this planet has yet to begin. Woman is the other face of the earth. Woman is the Unpredictable Subject. Free oneself from subjection here, now, in this present. The Autor of those pages was Carla Lonzi. How is it possible, I wondered, that a woman knows how to think like that. I worked so hard on books, but I endured them, I never actually used them, I never turned them against themselves. This is thinking. This is thinking against. I — after so much exertion — don’t know how to think. Nor does mariarosa: she’s read pages and pages, and she rearranges them with flair, putting n a show. That’s it. Lila, on the other hand, knows. It’s her nature. If she had studied, she would know how to think like his.”
Chapter 85
“Pietro took the three children and me in the car to an ugly house in Viareggio hat we had rented then he returned to Florence to try to finish his book. Look, I said to myself, now I’m a vacationer, a well-off lady with three children, and a pile of toys, a beach umbrella in the front row, soft towels, plenty to eat, five bikinis in different colors, menthol cigarettes, the sun that darkens my skin and makes me even blonder.”
The Story of the Lost Child
Chapter 10
“Moving here and there, discussing with this and that person in a language that wasn’t mine but that I rapidly learned to manage, I gradually rediscovered an aptitude that I had displayed years before, with my previous book: I had a natural ability to transform small private events into public reflection. Every night I improvised successfully, starting from my own experience. I talked about the world I came from, about the poverty and squalor, male and also female rages, about Carmen and her bond with her brother, her justifications for violent actions that she surely would never commit. I talked about how, since I was a girl, I had observed in my mother and other women the most humiliating aspects of daily life, of motherhood, of subjection to males. I talked about how, for a love of a man, one could be driven to be guilty of every possible infamy toward other women, toward children.”
Chapter 19
“I confessed that I liked subversive words, words that denounced the compromises of the parties and the violence of the state. Politics — I said — politics the way you think about it, as it certainly is, bores me. I leave it to you, I’m not made for that sort of engagement.”’
Chapter 49
“They consider Italy a splendid corner of the planet and, at the same time, an insignificant and ineffectual province, habitable only for a short vacation. Dede often says to me: Leave, come and stay in my house, you can do your work from there. I say yes, sooner or later I will. They’re proud of me and yet I know that none of them would tolerate me for long, not even Imma by now. The world has changed tremendously and belongs more and more to them, and less and less to me. But that’s all right — I said to myself, caressing Hamid —in the end what counts is these very smart girls who haven’t encountered a single one of the difficulties I faced. They have habits, voices, requirements, entitlements, self-awareness that even today I wouldn’t dare to allow myself. Others haven’t had the same luck. In he wealthier countries a mediocrity that hides the horrors of the rest of the world has prevailed. When those horrors release a violence that reaches into our cities and our habits we’re startled, we’re alarmed. Last year I was dying of fear and I made long phone calls to Dede, to Elsa, even to Pietro, when I saw on television the planecs that set the towers in New York ablave the way you would light a match by gently striking the head. In the world below is the inferno My daughters know it but only through words, and they become indignant, all the time enjoying the pleasures of existence while it lasts. They attribute their well-being and their success to their father. But I — I who did not have privileges — am the foundation of their privilege.”
ENDS//
