Elena Ferrante: The Neapolitan Quartet
Apr. 4th, 2018 03:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakI've just finished the Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante, consisting of the novels "My Brilliant Friend", "The Story of a New Name", "Those who leave and those who stay" and "The Story of the Lost Child", which I started almost a year ago. They live up to the hype, though they are as far from a "feel good" or "empowering" story about female friendship as you can get while telling a tale with the complicated, intense relationship between two women at its heart. There is, at different points in their lives, as much anger, jealousy (both intellectual and sexual) and alienation between our heroines, Elena (the narrator) and Lila as there is support, trust and affection. They each achieve triumphs as well as defeats, but they are always temporary. And the roles keep changing; if at first Elena is the overlooked hedgehog to flashy Lila's hare, making the race out of their childhood poverty via sheer diligence and industry as well wihle Lila is sabotaged by a mixture of patriarchal circumstance and her own temper, this changes back and forth.
It's also one of those stories - like The Shawshank Redemption or The Barefoot Contessa - where the narrator telling the tale is not its central hero(ine), which keeps said central hero neatly enigmatic and fascinating. (For that matter, this is also how the ACD Sherlock Holmes stories work, and not for nothing are the two where Holmes takes over the narration not held in high regard.) Elena's fascination with her friend is certainly shared by the reader, though then again: since Elena, in the novel, is a writer as well, there is a very meta awareness that this is also a story about the way we construct each other. In the last volume, Elena reflects that she loves Lila - who at that point has already begun her endeavour to erase herself that's announced in the first novel's opening, which is why I don't regard it as spoilery - and wants to keep something of Lila for the world - but specifically Lila as she, Elena, writes her. In the second novel's opening, Elena destroys Lila's notebooks, an action that's easily among the most shocking in the Quartet to me (which is saying something, not just because this is a novel set for the larger part at a brutal location where the physical and emotional violence is always considerable) but which is, in a way, the counterpart of Lila's repeated attempts to direct Elena's life for her.
The cast of supporting characters mainly consists of a couple of families in the impoverished, crime-ridden part of Naples where Lila and Elena grow up, and the way their lives intertwine with our heroines allows the author to depict various levels of society as well as the social upveal in the decades she covers - and the question of what it means to be a woman in those decades. I've seen complaints that the men are all in various degrees weak or tyrannical or both, and I disagree; there are sympathetic male characters (Enzo and Pasquale first and foremost, arguably also Antonio). But unsympathetic or sympathetic, the male characters mostly show up to trigger reactions in the women; it's never their story.
One of the meta elements in the saga are Lila's and Elena's disagreement about fiction - Elena at first thinks you need to bring structure and order into the raw material life delivers via fiction, but ends up concluding that Lila is right about this not capturing reality (and in any event not the reality of Lila herself), that only disorder and open endings would do. Add to this the irony that while there are some unsolved mysteries (besides a central one) by the end of the Quartet, there is also a strong structural sense; in a way, the story comes full circle, via a narrative device whose construction Elena herself as the narrator pointed out earlier.
I hear there's been a British stage version, and there will be a tv version. One of the elements I wonder most about is how not being in Elena's head will make a difference. Elena-the-narrator is ruthless with herself in the novels, depicting all her bad moments, petty motivations etc. without trying to excuse them, but she also gets across her tremendous insecurities. Which the character doesn't talk about to many other people, especially not Lila when they're trying to compete. If a tv version doesn't get this across some way, I'm a bit afraid the balance between the two central characters will be lost.
But be that as it may: it's very gratifying that four novels with women at the heart of them became international bestsellers, and that they're also damm good books.
It's also one of those stories - like The Shawshank Redemption or The Barefoot Contessa - where the narrator telling the tale is not its central hero(ine), which keeps said central hero neatly enigmatic and fascinating. (For that matter, this is also how the ACD Sherlock Holmes stories work, and not for nothing are the two where Holmes takes over the narration not held in high regard.) Elena's fascination with her friend is certainly shared by the reader, though then again: since Elena, in the novel, is a writer as well, there is a very meta awareness that this is also a story about the way we construct each other. In the last volume, Elena reflects that she loves Lila - who at that point has already begun her endeavour to erase herself that's announced in the first novel's opening, which is why I don't regard it as spoilery - and wants to keep something of Lila for the world - but specifically Lila as she, Elena, writes her. In the second novel's opening, Elena destroys Lila's notebooks, an action that's easily among the most shocking in the Quartet to me (which is saying something, not just because this is a novel set for the larger part at a brutal location where the physical and emotional violence is always considerable) but which is, in a way, the counterpart of Lila's repeated attempts to direct Elena's life for her.
The cast of supporting characters mainly consists of a couple of families in the impoverished, crime-ridden part of Naples where Lila and Elena grow up, and the way their lives intertwine with our heroines allows the author to depict various levels of society as well as the social upveal in the decades she covers - and the question of what it means to be a woman in those decades. I've seen complaints that the men are all in various degrees weak or tyrannical or both, and I disagree; there are sympathetic male characters (Enzo and Pasquale first and foremost, arguably also Antonio). But unsympathetic or sympathetic, the male characters mostly show up to trigger reactions in the women; it's never their story.
One of the meta elements in the saga are Lila's and Elena's disagreement about fiction - Elena at first thinks you need to bring structure and order into the raw material life delivers via fiction, but ends up concluding that Lila is right about this not capturing reality (and in any event not the reality of Lila herself), that only disorder and open endings would do. Add to this the irony that while there are some unsolved mysteries (besides a central one) by the end of the Quartet, there is also a strong structural sense; in a way, the story comes full circle, via a narrative device whose construction Elena herself as the narrator pointed out earlier.
I hear there's been a British stage version, and there will be a tv version. One of the elements I wonder most about is how not being in Elena's head will make a difference. Elena-the-narrator is ruthless with herself in the novels, depicting all her bad moments, petty motivations etc. without trying to excuse them, but she also gets across her tremendous insecurities. Which the character doesn't talk about to many other people, especially not Lila when they're trying to compete. If a tv version doesn't get this across some way, I'm a bit afraid the balance between the two central characters will be lost.
But be that as it may: it's very gratifying that four novels with women at the heart of them became international bestsellers, and that they're also damm good books.
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no subject
Date: 2018-04-04 03:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-04-04 04:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-04-05 09:19 am (UTC). . . and I am now thinking of all the complications to Jessica and Trish's relationship in s. 2 of Jessica Jones and how much I was disturbed by some of the same things that in Ferrante I appreciated. I know a superhero tv series (even an unusually dark and complicated one) is obviously a different genre than a quartet of litfic novels. But. My expectations were also so very different. Something to continue to think about . . .
no subject
Date: 2018-04-05 03:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-04-16 05:30 pm (UTC)Did you read English or German translation?
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Date: 2018-04-17 02:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-09 09:22 pm (UTC)I wonder how many of the characters are inspired by real people in the life of Elena Ferrante - it's certainly no coincidence her narrator shares the author's first name, even if it's a pseudonym.