I love that Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels ended in bitterness. Elena is pleased her daughters seem to be better off than she was, but her books, her literary career, suddenly seems empty. Her works seem merely symptoms of the times and places she—and we, the readers—lived through. Among other things it’s a rebuke to Proust, who ended his epic so pleased with himself for writing it. And her friend, Lina, whose different destiny has generated their mutual story, has disappeared. In part because of Elena's writing.
I don’t understand the blurbists when they call it great and unprecedented. Doesn’t anybody read Natalia Ginzburg anymore? Didn’t anybody else watch La meglio gioventù (2003)?
But that’s not Ferrante’s fault. The cycle is tremendous. It’s also entertaining. The third volume, Those who leave and those who stay, is a permanent accomplishment. It creates an atmosphere of chaos, meaning both danger and the possibility of escape.
It begins with Elena’s encounter with the student revolutionaries. This is presented as a stupid misunderstanding. Seems accurate. Certainly it isn’t sentimental. First we follow Elena’s bewilderment among her new intellectual friends. Then we follow Lina’s path, dealing with conditions at the factory. Lina and Enzo’s comrade Pasquale, and the Dr. Galiani’s daughter Nadia—the chic woman Elena envies so—remain in the background. But in a sense they become the central characters. By the end of the volume it seems established that they were the terrorists who attacked Lina’s factory. But it’s not certain. Organizing, the conflict becomes Lina’s excuse for leaving the factory, and returning to the old neighborhood. All the threads come together. Gino from the old neighborhood becomes the leader of the neofascists. In the end, everyone—the anarchists, the neofascists, the thugs, the intellectuals, the stupid idealist Pietro—all revert to their original idiotic awfulness as neighborhood characters.
Perhaps the best thing in the last volume is the horrible epilogue of this thread, when Nadia emerges from hiding to tell lies to the police, and make everybody’s life miserable.
What does it mean that the Neapolitan novels are not the only multi-volume literary Bildungsroman of the moment—the most prominent being Eward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose cycle (2011-4), and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (2009-11)?
Ferrante’s novels were published later (2011-4), and start further back in time—the Fifties rather than the Sixties.
All three cycles detail desperate struggles to escape (family, home, dialect, fate). Their protagonists engage in idiotic behavior, we share all their varies modes of shame and remorse. All are intensely specific about places. The action is always defined by the scene. Ferrante’s whole epic emerges from the fact that Elena leaves the old neighborhood, while Lina stays. In Ferrante, venturing just a few blocks away is as significant as Patrick Melrose’s expulsion from Saint-Nazaire. Knausgaard begins a new life with each new apartment.
Ferrante’s Elena and Knausgaard aspire to write, though both are acutely aware that the desire for money, fame, and escape complicates the picture. St. Aubyn’s Patrick just wants to avoid madness and monsterhood, which turns out to be much more ambitious. Patrick and Knausgaard have substance abuse issues, to put it mildly. Ferrante’s women are spared that, but they have their own problems. Knausgaard’s terrified of his father, Ferrante of her mother, Patrick of both.
Sylistically, the cycles couldn’t be more different: St. Aubyn’s books are tidy and compact IEDs. Knausgaard transforms embarrassing over-sharing into art. Ferrante’s style is not so idiosyncratic. Her pace is brisk and she takes care to balance bitter and sweet. And so HBO & Rai have teamed up to turn the Neapolitan novels into a miniseries.
I look forward to it. It might be what the books are meant to be. Ferrante’s best moments are all cinematic: Lina having a tantrum about Marcello’s shoes at her wedding, the neighbors discovering that Giuseppina Peluso hung herself mid-pedicure, Mariarosa breastfeeding Mirko at the student meeting, Manuela’s blue fan fluttering at Elisa’s awful banquet, Elena and Lina watching their neighbors flee a earthquake from inside a car, ….