This is the third book of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet (2012-2015) which I have been reading, slowly, since 2017. The stories – and I believe the Quartet was written as a single novel but at 1,600 odd pages was simply too long to publish that way – are of the narrator, Lena, and her sometime best friend, Lila, born in ‘the Neighbourhood’, the poorest part of Naples, around 1945.
The first, My Brilliant Friend, which brought Ferrante to ‘instant’ fame is often read it seems to me as a girlish coming-of-age, but it is much more important than that. The Quartet is a long and fascinating discussion of what makes a (woman) writer.
Both girls are born into abject poverty and are expected to be subservient to their fathers, their brothers and to any boy/man to whom they might be seen as attached. Instead, through hard work and natural brilliance they rise, or have the potential to rise, out of the Neighbourhood. Lena into educated, liberal Italian society and Lila, the more naturally gifted, choosing, for reasons neither we nor Lena understand, choosing to stay.
In the Neighbourhood, just below the surface all the time are the Solara brothers, Marcello and Michele, bullies at school, the bad boys all the girls want, local hoodlums, their mother the local moneylender, rising in this book to wealthy businessmen, standing in maybe for the ‘Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia, which is never mentioned.
The heart of the Quartet is summed up by this quote of Lila berating Lena:
“Why did you study so much? What fucking use has it been for me to imagine that you would enjoy a wonderful life for me too? I was wrong, you’re a fool.”
It’s the late 1960s. Lila and her son – her ex-lover Nino’s son or her ex-husband Steffano’s son? – have an apartment near but not in the Neighbourhood, which they share with Enzo, a friend from the girls’ schooldays. Enzo supports them; Lila insists on separate beds; Lila works in a sausage factory, boning, cleaning the floors, subject to sexual assault; at night Enzo and Lila study computer programming by correspondence.
In Paris workers and students are rising up – as we will discuss when I get to Daniel Cohn Bendit’s Obsolete Communism at the end of next month – Lila engages with the Communists via Nadia and Pasquale who make brief appearances off and on through the novel. They produce a pamphlet which improves nothing and puts Lila in a difficult situation in the factory.
Lena is basking in the glow of the success of her novel, though too much is made of the ‘dirty’ bits. It is interesting that we seem to know very little about Elena Ferrante. The Quartet is framed as the biography or maybe the fictionalised biography of Elena Greco, writing in the early 2000s. I’ve spent the last quarter century studying Miles Franklin, and the parallels with My Brilliant Career and My Career Goes Bung are very close. Lena, Sybylla/Franklin write fictional biographies of their coming of age which launch their careers as writers; and then write further novels, encompassing their initial works, fictionalising their dealing with the fallout of fame, local and national.
The Neighbourhood are largely proud of Lena’s success, though her mother thinks she has portrayed herself as a whore; Franklin’s neighbourhood, and many of her family, though not her parents, were angry with their portrayals.
If Ferrante was not born poor in Naples, growing up to be an academic in the north, if these novels are not the autofiction they appear to be, then I will be very disappointed. If they are the result of imagined rather than lived experience then I think they have a lot less to say.
Lena listens to Lila and writes up an expose of the conditions at the sausage factory which is accepted by L’Unità, the Communist Party newspaper. Lena becomes a columnist for them, returns to her home in the north. Lila remains contemptuous.
For much of the rest of the book Lena and Lila are in different cities, communicating, often with long gaps, only by phone. Lila’s story is relatively straightforward – first Enzo and then she get jobs in computing, converting work procedures into algorithms which they programme into IBM mainframes with punch cards. They are successful and work their way up to high-paying jobs.
When the fascist son of the pharmacist, and then the owner of the sausage factory are shot dead Lena, with no evidence, suspects that Lila has remained connected with Nadia and Pasquale. We think of the Red Brigades, but as with the mafia, Ferrante doesn’t say these words out loud, though she does briefly mention Baader-Meinhoff.
Lena marries Pietro, a very dull young professor of Latin, and they go to live in Florence. Pietro’s far more interesting mother and sister, who live in Milan, remain strong presences in Lena’s life. In the background always is Nino, the boy from the Neighbourhood on whom she had a crush; who Lila took from her; who is now a respected intellectual, well known in the circles she moves in.
Their first night:
As soon as we got to our apartment and closed the door we began to make love. At first it was very pleasurable, but … Pietro strained for a time that seemed endless. His thrusting was deliberate, violent, so that the initial pleasure slowly diminished, overwhelmed by the monotonous insistence and the hurt I felt in my stomach … desire disappeared … I whispered words of love and yet I hoped he would stop. When he exploded with a roar … I was hurting and unsatisfied.
Later in the night, when she wakes, she finds him at his desk, working. “I’m sure that I became pregnant that night.”
The second half of the novel is Lena dealing with a boring and unsatisfactory marriage.
They have two daughters. For a number of years Lena finds she can’t write. Pietro disrespects her intellectually. Memories of her initial success fade. She has to turn to her mother for help with the children. Back in Naples her younger sister, and through her the whole family, become involved with the Solaras. As does Lila.
Pietro and Lena fight …
Did I enjoy it? I loved it. Do I recommend it? Of course. This is a fascinating account of the Neapolitan underclass and northern Italian educated upper middle class coming into bewildered contact, not just through Lena, but through Nino; through Pietro’s acceptance of his uneducated inlaws; through Nadia, the professor’s daughter, joining the communists; through Adele, Pietro’s mother using her contacts to help Lena’s friends. Do I have any questions? Sorry. I was too engrossed reading.
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Elana Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Europa Editions, London, 2014. Translated by Ann Goldstein. 418pp.
Elana Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet:
My Brilliant Friend (review)
The Story of a New Name (review)
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
The Story of the lost Child