ON READING ELENA FERRANTE

Last week, I succumbed, at last, to the Ferrante fury and I'm still processing it all.

My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante. Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. Europa Editions, 2012.

In the last decade, I’d been hearing a lot about the work of a mysterious Italian author who wrote under the pseudonym of Elena Ferrante. Soon after the publication of The Story Of The Lost Child, the fourth in her series called the Neapolitan Novels, I saw people writing on social media about having finished the series and reflecting on their friendships. I’d also been curious about how writing about female friendships could actually make the world sit up and take notice. Above all, I wondered what there was to say about friendship and love in Italian that had not been said before in the world of English.

I was, of course, incredulous about how Ferrante had managed to remain anonymous in an era when anonymity itself was considered a failing. Over the decade, the conspiracy theories around the real identity of Elena Ferrante have been so compelling that I have no doubt that these together will inspire a television series on the nature of ego, identity and validation.

In an essay titled Pain and Pen, written as one of several lectures she gave at the University of Bologna in 2020, Ferrante clarifies that she is a woman. She closes her essay about the pain associated with revealing one’s true self on the page with a final reflection on the nature of compelling work. “Beautiful writing becomes beautiful when it loses its harmony and has the desperate power of the ugly. And character? I feel they are false when they exhibit clear coherence and I become passionate about them when they say one thing and do the opposite.”

Ferrante has continued to remain elusive, despite her nomination for the Strega, the Booker and other illustrious prizes. As this documentary Ferrante Fever suggests, in literary circles around the world, the topic of Elena Ferrante seems to be fraught, frustrating, and fascinating, just as Lila herself, the character in My Brilliant Friend.

Rome will have to do when you have no pictures of Naples. By the Spanish Steps.

The Neapolitan Novels begin in 2010 when the son of an old friend telephones Lenù, a woman in her sixties. Lila, her childhood friend has disappeared; the son, Rino, is unable to find her. Lenù recognizes this behavior as something Lila, in her later years, has always talked about doing, and is pretty confident that her friend’s disappearance is a conscious decision executed perfectly by her.

The opening of the novel is punchy and riveting. In the world of writing, agents talk about the importance of the first page. My Brilliant Friend’s first page is eye-popping, especially because it’s so devoid of empathy. Lenù peremptorily tells the son off when he calls her about his mother having been missing for a couple of weeks.

He began to cry and I let him act out his desperation, sobs that began fake and became real. When he stopped I said:

“Please, for once behave as she would like: don’t look for her.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. It’s pointless. Learn to stand on your own two feet and don’t call me again, either.”

I hung up.

How does anyone not want to read on after that? When Lila’s continued disappearance begins to concern her, Lenù goes about putting onto paper everything she remembers about Lila.

The tale of the two friends begins with the story of the meeting of their dolls in a gritty building in a poor neighborhood of Naples. The day Lila tosses Lenù’s doll into the dark basement of the building where dolls and chairs and leaves and food go to die, Lenù retaliates by tossing Lila’s doll into the abyss.

Lila and Lenù are equals now. Without their dolls, they’re equal—in their anger, in their misery, and certainly, in their rivalry. What sets Lila apart from the start, however, is her courage of conviction, her need to control the narrative and her agency. There is a small, yet seminal, moment in the tale when Lila and Lenù walk up five flights of stairs to scary Don Achilles’ apartment. Lila extends a hand to Lenù who accepts it gladly and falls in line. Their steps are now in sync but we always know who is in charge.

From that point on until the end of time, their lives are intertwined. Their fortunes, however, often seesaw; each is morose about the good fortune of the other. When Lenù’s life changes for the better, Lila’s tanks in some unpredictable way, and vice versa. When their teacher praises Lila for her effortless acumen, Lenù is aghast but pretends to not show it and works that much harder to be at the top of the class. Where Lila loses, owing to her effrontery or her principles, Lenù makes up by being “good” and focused. Where Lila will not compromise, Lenù will, in order to get ahead until, one day years later, Lila capitulates, deciding to marry a man who splurges on her to satisfy every one of her fantasies.

“He’s rich,” I heard Lila repeat, and we started laughing. But then she added, “Also nice, also good,” and I agreed, those last were qualities that Marcello didn’t have, a further reason for being on Stefano’s side. Yet those two adjectives confused me. I felt that they gave the final blow to the shine of childish fantasies.”

Every friendship in the world is as much about love and chemistry as it is about one-upmanship and envy. Lila is the self-confident, aggressive, helpful, bright and manipulative friend. She challenges and makes Lenù aim higher, yet she makes her resent her guts because she makes Lenù’s own successes feel like an offshoot of her own. Granted, Lila is also the friend who stands up for Lenù, no matter what.

Friendships are complicated. When we’re young, the borders are clear and well-defined. When we’re older, however, we lie to others—and often to ourselves—about having transcended basic human limitations. The need to be popular and accepted trumps everything else. We try hard to be refined about how we must feel, weighed down as we are about our insecurities. Elena Ferrante’s work suggests that in every deep friendship, the lines will inevitably be blurred. When jealousy, loyalty, selfishness, envy and love commingle and contradict, what will triumph? It’s unclear. Time will only tell, especially when the private constantly impinges on the public.

It’s clear, right from the outset, that Lila wants to be in charge of the narrative—whether it’s their friendship, the proceedings in the classroom, the outcome of a math competition, education (or the lack of it) or marriage. Lila is the brilliant friend all along, of that there’s little doubt. Yet, on the day they’re both about sixteen, the brilliant Lila calls the diligent Lenù “my brilliant friend”. The moment took my breath away and, admittedly, made Jonathan Franzen shed tears. It’s one of the most heartbreaking moments of this masterpiece because it lays out how a sense of purpose and fulfillment eludes the best of us. You can be an academic superstar, but brilliance, opportunity, preparation and money must intersect at the right moment.

Somewhere in Rome, obviously, and so perfect, I felt, for this post.

The notion of “Dissolving Margins” haunts the novel from start to finish. Lila seems to undergo a out-of-body experience in moments of great emotional distress, when she or someone she is close to experiences a mental and emotional overhaul. It was as if “on the night of a full moon over the sea, the intense black mass of a storm advanced across the sky, swallowing every light, eroding the circumference of the moon’s circle, and disfiguring the shining disk, reducing it to its true nature of rough insensate material.” On the night of New Year’s eve, Lila imagines that she sees her brother break. She feels that something had “violated the organic structure of her brother, exercising over him a pressure so strong that it broke down his outlines, and the matter expanded like a magma, showing her what he was truly made of.”

Ferrante describes, in entirely new language, how people change in elemental ways when all the forces inside and outside of them are driving them towards something. It’s a terrifying idea to contend with, whatever our age, and it’s just one of the endlessly magnificent passages in this tour de force.

Gaeta is a coastal city south of Rome. It’s home to Roman ruins and Mediterranean vegetation. I believe this photograph was taken en route to Rome.