THOSE WHO CANNOT STOP READING

A furious writer demands a furious reader. In eleven days I finished the series of four novels by Elena Ferrante.

Courtesy Wikipedia: “The Neapolitan Novels are a four-part series by the pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante, published originally by Edizioni e/o, translated into English by Ann Goldstein, and published by Europa Editions (New York). The names of the novels are My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014), and The Story of the Lost Child (2015). In the Italian edition, the whole series bears the title of the first novel L'amica geniale ("My Brilliant Friend").”

“Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them.”

~~~The Story of The Lost Child, Elena Ferrante

This post has to go out in a few hours and I just turned the last page of the fourth and final book of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels about an hour ago. I’ve never blazed through any text with the ferocity with which I’ve attacked these four books.

After reading my last post on Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, a friend called to say she was shaken. It had got her thinking about her own life and her early relationships. She realized she hadn’t held on to some really special childhood friendships. Now, this late in life, she felt there was no way to rekindle them. It’s a loss that’s all too real for those of us in our seventh decade when most of our life is behind us.  Like my friend, I too have been riddled with all sorts of questions as I blazed through Ferrante’s works. Her Neapolitan Novels seem to have a peculiar effect on people and I have been hypnotized by her storytelling.

As I stated in my post last week, what begins as the story of two friends in My Brilliant Friend, the first of the quartet, evolves into a gripping saga of how their lives collide, with extraordinary vehemence, over the next five decades. The works are set in a grimy working class neighborhood of Naples, yet they manage to pierce those of us from diverse backgrounds. Despite having grown up in the privileged chaos of lower middle class life in a big Indian city (and in Africa), I could relate, almost completely, to the dirt, the squalor, the passion, the unpredictability, the callousness and the aspirational fever of the Neapolitan working class.

In the tug of war between the two friends in My Brilliant Friend, I also saw my own relationship with my friends, from adolescence until now. I felt the joy, the laughter, the doubts and the insecurities that, even now, continue to color my life. How much did I actually love my besties? How far would I go to help them? When would I need to call them out on something? How must I continue to walk the fine line between both diplomacy and candor? What was the meaning of a true friendship in which we often told half-truths to one another? How much was my inner life buttressed by those of my close friends? Could I be entirely happy for them even if my own life were unraveling, for reasons beyond my control?

The Neapolitan stories raise many such questions about close relationships. We glean that almost always while people cannot thrive in a vacuum, the only way to do exceptional work and stay centered is by not seeking validation from our intimate relationships. Yet, to not seek validation seems somehow antithetical to the very nature of a symbiotic relationship. How then do we achieve equilibrium, the sort of “homeostasis” that guarantees our daily happiness? According to Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, it’s almost always impossible to achieve this balance.

For both Lila and Lenù, balance and peace of mind are elusive, whether in their marriage or in their own relationship. When Lenù’s sister falls in love with Marcello Solara, a local thug whose businesses are covers for drug operations, Lenù reproaches her parents for having crossed the invisible line between rectitude and corruption. But life, as her mother reminds her, is about compromises, after all, and everyone needs to get ahead and feel as if they belong.

Sooner or later, as Ferrante suggests, everyone will have to make choices, and all too often, they will be doing so forsaking something they believed in or espoused earlier. As my daughter observes, people who don’t have children often profess to be liberal and progressive. The day they must decide on which school they would like their children to attend, the world gets to see how much they are willing to compromise.

I’d like to bring up a question posed by fellow Substack writer Peter Moore last week. After reading my post, he had this to say: “I’ll be interested to see how you feel about the rest of the novels in the series. I loved the first and second ones, but as these girls turn into women, I found the narrative to become less passionate, more complaining, and finally dissolving into selfish behavior and whining. But then, what do guys know?”

Peter wasn’t off the mark. The third and the fourth books certainly have the qualities he complains about but I found them absorbing nevertheless. The books describe the period when these two women are up against the challenges all women face as they seek to root themselves both in the world of work and in family life. Their greatest challenge is this: they’re wanting to settle down but they don’t want to settle. The men they meet are gorgeous when they are lovers but the minute they are fixtures in the bedroom, their attitude towards their women and the house changes. The men I met in this collection are, with the exception, perhaps of Enzo and to some extent, Pietro, all selfish, and lacking in empathy.

What I found refreshing in these books was the idea that a woman had every right to be an adulterous; what’s astonishing, however, is the hypocrisy of a society in which men are not judged for straying but women are judged, by women, no less, for having acted out on their fantasies by leaving their husband and their children in order to chase their dreams.