Has a particular novel ever attracted you, but you never got around to reading it? I don’t mean War and Peace or Remembrance of Things Past, though they’ve headed my list of books to finish for most of my life.
I’m thinking of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, the first of her popular four-book series of Neapolitan Novels. The cover is enchanting. But why is the young groom looking out to sea?
Reviewers words include, “an intimate epic, female friendship, precision and passion, intriguing setting.” A woman’s book of fantasy, travel, love, diary secrets revealed! Sometimes you want to escape into such a novel. For the whole first volume and well into the second, The Story of a New Name, I couldn’t wait to get back to it.
I loved the author’s literary references and her conversational insights into relationships.
Elena is in her 60’s in the first volume, remembering her friend Lila and their childhood together in a poor section of Naples just after World War II. They are both intelligent, at the top of their class, but Lila ignores the traditional boundaries for girls that seem to entrap Elena, and drops out of school.
She dominates Elena with her often harsh, capricious nature. She fascinates her, just as she fascinated me. Elena can’t resist following her.
… [Lila] kept saying no until she, the teacher, and the principal were overcome by exhaustion. … Although she was fragile in appearance, every prohibition lost substance in her presence. She knew how to go beyond the limit without ever truly suffering the consequences. In the end people gave in, and were even, however unwillingly, compelled to praise her.
I enjoyed the lovely scenes of youthful courting, and the descriptions of Italian families and neighborhood life. It’s a good story. I felt I was living in that place at that time, learning a lot. I empathized with Elena’s beautiful naive spirit.
But intimations of rivalries and of things to come, began to shift the balance.
We were four girls in tears … Pasquale yielded only when he saw Lila crying. He said in a tone of resignation, ‘All right … I’ll settle things with the Solaras some other time, let’s go.’ … Lila, drying her tears with the back of her hand, asked, ‘Who are the Nazi Fascists, Pascà? Who are the monarchists, What’s the black market?’
Reviewers have said other words about Ferrante’s quartet of novels, such as “money and gradations of privilege that change lives” and “casually violent”. Young men in opposing families grow up competing viciously in a post-war economic boom. Family is everything. In the grip of tradition, women answer to their men.
Lila presents an awkward, compelling, dangerous defiance against these patterns. The author, Elena Ferrante (a pen name), seems faithful to historical and cultural reality.
For me, it was in Book 2 or 3 where the balance tipped away from Elena and Lila’s friendship and into the cutthroat male world. When Lila disappeared for a while, I lost my curiosity about what finally happens to these women.
But the writing flows so well that I want to say, if you’re OK with the realities of life in this neighborhood and in those days, it’s really fun to read Ferrante. This is from book two, The Story of a New Name:
Then [Lila] did something completely unexpected. I had just gone to bed when she appeared in the little room.
‘Will you give me one of your books?’ she asked.
I looked at her in bewilderment. She wanted to read? How long since she had opened a book, three, four years? And why now had she decided to start again? I took the volume of Beckett, the one I used to kill the mosquitoes, and gave it to her. It seemed the most accessible text I had.
I will always be rooting for these two girls with dreams in a dangerous world.
If you’ve read these novels, what do you think?