Naples, under the Sun

My Brilliant Friend
The Story of a New Name
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
The Story of the Lost Girl
by Elena Ferrante
Europa Editions, 2012–2015, about $30 each

Kierkegaard thought that those who made their desire for personal stability and social equality into an absolute, with no reference to the transcendent, were ignoring the rather important fact that they lived in a temporal world and “time is the very medium of differentiation”. In Elena Ferrante’s magisterial fiction quartet, the Neapolitan series, the presupposition seems to be that the temporal is all that exists—the eternal is scorned—so there is an urgency to achieving stability and equity here and now; but both remain tenuous because the differentiating flow of time constantly changes the conditions of reality. Although in different ways—through love and family, work and study, activism and politics—all of the many characters seek to grasp these elusive gifts, none can keep hold of them. The presuppositions held by an author, or their characters, need to be uncovered because they give the reader an idea, too often unconsidered, of the nature of the world into which the author is trying to entice them. For me, this interrogative process added a level of depth to the fascination of reading Ferrante’s long, brilliant narrative.

The four novels carry the narrative through four stages of life. My Brilliant Friend begins the story of Elena (Lena) Greco and Raffaella (Lila) Cerullo from their childhood to adolescence; they’re intelligent girls of very poor families in post-war Naples. Early in this first book, a key episode defines the relationship between the friends: playing near the rusting grill of a frightening neighbour’s cellar, the girls swap dolls. Lila shoves Elena’s doll through the grill and into the dark stink of the cellar. Elena does the same to Lila’s doll. Holding hands, the brave girls search the cellar but can’t recover the dolls. A pattern is established of unpredictable action, response, and an ambivalent but necessary togetherness.

The Story of a New Name follows the girls through late adolescence and the years of marriage for Lila and university for Lena. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay details the failure of Lila’s marriage, her battles with employers and with the local Camorrists, the Solara family. Lena has success as a fiction writer and cultural commentator; she marries, has affairs, and raises her daughters.

In these first three novels, Lila and Elena’s lives are deeply affected by men: bullied by boys, pursued by admirers, pursuing men themselves, their roles governed by fathers, brothers and husbands. The men are easily offended, quick to anger, and violent. They are also protective, hard-working and often generous, but the only day Elena had her father’s total attention was when they went together into the city centre so she could learn her way to college. The Story of the Lost Girl chronicles the decades of Elena and Lila’s middle to old age, when they have greater control over their own lives but find themselves more alone in their struggles.

The story is told by Elena, the accomplished writer. She was inspired, as she often was, by an action of Lila’s: at sixty-six years old, Lila vanished after the determined removal of every trace of her existence. Not even a hairpin of hers remained in her flat. After sixty years of tumultuous friendship, and furious at this final example of Lila’s capriciousness, Elena was not going to let her get away with the disappearance and wrote the four novels to preserve Lila’s history and their interwoven existence.

The novels are dramatic, traumatic, crowded with minor characters, and paced like thrillers. I did not once find myself pausing to admire any lyrical qualities of the prose, but many times I admired the exceptional skill of the storytelling. In one of her very rare interviews (the name “Elena Ferrante” is a pseudonym and the author’s identity has not been made public), Ferrante said she wrote the novels quickly, surprised at her own facility and ability to muster so many characters, and that her main concern was the story, not the style. She borrows storytelling techniques freely from all genres, including thrillers, to ensure the reader wants to turn the page. She succeeds. The pace is brisk, there’s taut dialogue, and each chapter, as a rule very short, has some drama that propels the story and ends at a point that had this reader eager to continue. I read all four books in three weeks, and that concentrated immersion in the characters and their story compounded, I’m sure, the mesmerising effect of the novels.

I wondered, whose writing does this remind me of? As in Dickens’s novels, the characters, especially the poor, have almost an excess of liveliness. If someone knocks down one of Dickens’s characters, he or she clambers back up with a scowl and a witticism. When one of the Neapolitan poor gets knocked down, male or female, they jump up spitting, punching and cursing. There is the same vigorous sense of dignity and abundance of energy. And as with Dickens, there is a concern for the poor together with a portrayal of the broader class structures and changing social conditions. Unlike Dickens, however, in Ferrante’s novels comedy and wit are rare; I think there’s a lack of realism here because the life of every person is rich with humour and farce if only we’d see it.

Sometimes the characters’ emotional energy reminded me of Dostoevsky’s frenetic characters: excitable, always involved in some contention, with an intense and often contradictory inner life. For example, nearly all the Neapolitan women are subjected to slapping and beatings, yet it is the women themselves who scorn gentle, meek men who don’t violently correct a shameless wife, girlfriend or daughter. And the women punch each other in the face and threaten to kill each other as if it’s normal behaviour. At other times, especially through the comments of Lila, I could hear echoes of Charles Bukowski’s fictional alter ego, Hank Chinaski. Like Chinaski, Lila is creative but it’s only a means to make money and gain a little stimulation. It doesn’t mean anything more and it won’t cheat death. Like Chinaski, Lila is alternately gentle and violent, wise and vulgar; she is acerbic, pragmatic, unsentimental. Also like Chinaski, she lives in a world of particulars, of discrete concretion, devoid of any sustaining metaphysical framework.

It’s not surprising then that Lila has a recurring ontological/psychological crisis: she senses that the borders of the particulars around her, including herself, are dissolving into a horrid amorphous state where all individuation is annihilated. It first occurs when she is a teenager, but increases in severity as she gets older. It affects her view of the world. In The Story of a Lost Child, she puts Elena’s concerns into a nihilistic perspective when Elena appeals for help:

“Don’t discourage me. In my job I have to paste one fact to another with words, and in the end everything has to seem coherent even if it’s not.”

“But if the coherence isn’t there, why pretend?”

On another occasion, Elena has to make a decision about sending her youngest daughter, Imma, to her father in Rome. Lila tells her to send her away. Elena reflects:

She seemed to be saying: Imma would be better off and so would you. I replied: If Imma leaves, too, my life will no longer have meaning. But she smiled: Where is it written that lives should have meaning? So she began to disparage all that struggle of mine to write. She said mockingly: Is the meaning that line of black markings that look like insect shit?

When I finished the last novel, I straightaway read Ecclesiastes because there were echoes there, too. Ferrante’s novels gave individual expression—in the lives of Lila and Elena—to Solomon’s magnificent essay on the puzzle of life lived under the sun, the way things change but don’t change, the turmoil of people’s hearts, the flow of time washing any achievement away, the frustration of wanting to know and remain but being unable to discover certainty or attain stability. Elena may hesitate to say it although she discerned it, but Lila would proclaim it because to her it was obvious: All is vanity! Futility! Chasing the wind!

All the authors I’ve cited here to help me locate the achievement of Ferrante are male. Ferrante identifies with feminism, but in her writing she says she wants the scale, the energy, the adventure, and the muscularity that men rather than women typically display in their fiction. I think she achieves this goal and that’s one reason her novels are celebrated. They are unmistakably written in a woman’s voice, Elena’s, but the tone is visceral and tough.

The scale of the ideas embodied in the novels is ambitious, as you would expect in a complex series whose narrative extends over sixty years. Friendship between women, personal identity, social mobility, feminism, motherhood, marriage, family roles and family violence, secularism, sociality, changing sexual mores, masculinity, crime, working conditions, loss, love, the counter-culture and political subversion are all expressed in the urgent action of the many storylines and characters that intersect, circle around, and meet again. Elena’s counter-culture ideologies tend to get their comeuppance in the novels, but I expect that the Neapolitan books will be ransacked by various ideologues who will overlook the obvious contradictions in order to claim support for various causes.

For example, in Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Elena builds her reputation as a social commentator through her feminist writing and lectures. She has a thesis that the Genesis creation account locks women into a definition that is intrinsically related to men; women exist only as men allow them to exist and men can claim a religious fiat for this state of affairs. She encourages women to find their own definition; to create themselves independently of men. Yet at the same time as she travels Europe presenting this thesis to audiences of women, she abandons her two young daughters and her gentle husband, Pietro, in order to begin an affair—distressing to all, especially her daughters—with Nino, a feckless, self-centred intellectual who, no shock here, is seeing other women as well as Elena. Lila warned her about Nino; Carmen warned her; I tried to warn her. All ignored. To her credit, Elena sees the contradiction; to her discredit, she does little about it because she likes the recognition of being a radical-type celebrity and she needs the money.

Ferrante is aware that a story must be true to itself and not to ideology. She has said that, when writing fiction, “at every step there is above all the risk that a story’s honesty will be clouded by good intentions, hypocritical calculations, or ideologies that exalt sisterhood in ways that are often nauseating”. Ferrante is clear about the integrity of storytelling and the foibles of humanity, especially once we start presenting our own interpretations as universal truths.

Ferrante also has clear sight for the world of children, especially young girls. The friendship between Lila’s daughter Tina and Imma, Elena’s daughter by Nino, is portrayed with a sensitivity that is a wonder. Both children are present to the reader in a rare way; precocious, generous Tina and slower, more vulnerable Imma, eager to have Tina’s affection and attention. The skill with which Ferrante portrays these two little children, especially the vivacious Tina, makes what happens to Tina all the more wrenching. It is unresolved, cruel in its effects on Lila and Enzo, her partner in business and life, and it’s a black void in the last novel that I resented Ferrante imposing on the story.

Of course, my response demonstrates that Ferrante’s storytelling instincts were correct. Perhaps Ferrante herself doesn’t know why the story demanded the distressing event—she knows stories have a unfathomable trajectory of their own—but it does precipitate the conclusion of the story: Lila becomes withdrawn and eccentric; she and Enzo break up; Lila neglects herself and loses her eye-catching elegance; her visions of the deliquescent nature of reality become more terrifying. She is offended by Elena’s successful book about their friendship, written contrary to Lila’s desire for privacy, and she completely ignores Elena’s entreaties to spend time together now they are in old age, “when we are in need of closeness and solidarity”. Then she vanishes. Elena remembered that Lila had spoken of her desire to disappear. Somehow Lila, Elena’s lifelong brilliant friend, had found a way to do it.

At the end of the quartet of novels, Elena, settled in Turin, reads the papers in the park and walks the labrador she has acquired for company. Men are no longer attracted by her; she has lost her figure. She still has a literary reputation and she delights in the beauty and accomplishments of her daughters and grandchildren—when she sees them. One day, a package arrives. It is the two dolls that young Elena and Lila had lost. Elena knows that Lila is still alive. She also knows she will never see her again.

This epilogue left me feeling bereft. My throat and chest ached. I went for a walk. I telephoned my children just to talk. I missed them and my dearest friends who all live hundreds of kilometres away. I was aware of the ineluctable mystery of my own life and, at heart, the unknowable, mysterious being of the people I loved. It has been a long time since I was so affected by fiction. I then read King Solomon: “The heart knows its own bitterness, and a stranger does not share it.” And again:

One event happens to the righteous and to the wicked; to the good, the clean and the unclean; to him who sacrifices and to him who does not sacrifice, as is the good, so is the sinner; and he who takes an oath, as he who fears an oath. This is an evil in all that is done under the sun: that one thing happens to all. Truly, the hearts of the sons of men are full of evil; madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead.

 In the years before she disappears, Lila studies the history of Naples, the city where she was born and never once left. She discovers that it was built on garbage dumps, sewer pits, blood-soaked gladiatorial arenas, scenes of corruption, pretension and greed. From the post-war years through to the new millennium, Naples has changed and Lila sees the new business towers constructed in the city centre; but she realises all the changes are based on what never changes: selfish ambition, violence, lust for power and pleasure. Lila knows criminals have significant power in Italy, just as they’ve always done, although now they wear suits, sit in parliament, and spout liberal sentiments in glib sound-bites.