Fifty Books Project 2023

One morning I bought a graph-paper notebook and began to write, in the third person, about what had happened to me that night on the beach near Barano.  Then, still in the third person, I wrote what had happened to me on Ischia.  Then I wrote a little about Naples and the neighborhood.  Then I changed names and places and situations.  Then I imagined a dark force crouching in the life of the protagonist, an entity that had the capacity to weld the world around her, with the colors of the flame of a blowtorch:  a blue-violet dome where everything went well for her, shooting sparks, but that soon came apart, breaking up into meaningless gray fragments.  I spent twenty days writing this story, a period during which I saw no one, I went out only to eat.  Finally I reread some pages, I didn’t like them, and I forgot about it.  But I found that I was calmer, as if the shame had passed from me to the notebook.  I went back into the world…

The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

This is the second book in Ferrante’s celebrated Neapolitan quartet.  I read My Brilliant Friend last year, and liked it,  though perhaps not to the same degree as others – the quartet has become something of a phenomenon.  That first novel was wonderfully atmospheric, capturing the impoverished neighborhood and the oppressive limits imposed by that poverty and the air of violence that permeated everything.  Some of that violence was domestic, some of it associated with mafia-like gangs, but all of it speaking of a collective frustration.  The two protagonists, young girls born only weeks apart who are recognized by their first-grade teacher for their intelligence, are lively and real and the question of whether intelligence will get them anywhere in that world seems vital.  I was put off by a certain “I do this then I do that” quality in the plot – incident piles upon incident with the only sense of direction being the aging of the girls.  The narrator’s obsessive competition with her brilliant friend also seemed repetitive.  I finished the novel thinking I had the taste of this popular story that I needed and would skip the other three – though almost everyone I knew was reading them feverishly.

This fall, I spent some time with old friends and an energetic and passionate conversation about the four novels renewed my interest.  My friends were trying to work out the issue of identity in the novel – starting with the actual identity of the author. (Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym and the author has managed to avoid having any other identity become public despite a literally world-wide level of curiosity.)   I find the question of authorship somewhat boring – I am content to let the pseudonym be.  But the relationship of the narrator to the two protagonists and of the protagonists to each other intrigued me.

The book is obviously designed to lead the reader to think it is autobiographical – full of references to memory and recall.  The author’s chosen name is Elena.  The narrator’s name is Elena.  The other girl’s name is Lina.  The two girls are born in the same place and at the same time.  They are from similarly poor families and suffer under the restrictions of their poverty and of the general patriarchal limitations that women face.

The author splits them by having the narrator, Elena, be allowed to continue her education beyond the 5^thgrade point when most people – and virtually all girls – stop.  Her brilliant friend, Lina, stops school at that point, though she desperately wants to continue.  For reasons that are not clear to the girls, their teacher advocates for Elena’s education more successfully than she advocates for Lina’s.  A simple conversation changes the course of Elena’s life, separating her from her friend.  We are told over and over (and over and over) that Lina is as intelligent as Elena.  In fact, one of the fears that drives Elena is her suspicion that Lina is smarter than her and that the educational opportunity has been given to the wrong girl.

What develops is a kind of fictional case study in how a simple change can affect a life path.  In this second novel we see Lina married to a sexist pig of a man who has risen from poverty to relative wealth.  She lives a comfortable life, but one void of love or any sort of emotional or intellectual growth.  Elena continues through middle school and onto high school and university, scraping by on a meager allowance from her parents and a few dead-end jobs, but being introduced to a wider world of culture and ideas.

Along the way, Lina’s hunger for meaning and substance leads her into adultery, domestic violence, and a bold break for independence that leaves her to raise a child in dire poverty, subsisting on the stingy wages from her dangerous job at a meat packing plant.  In other words, she lives out the destiny of a girl of her class.  Elena has several love affairs, faces class-prejudice among her educated friends, but succeeds beautifully as an academic and by the end of the novel has become a novelist, albeit one who suspects her friend would have been the better writer, given the chance.  

The connection between the two kept my interest.  They are fully formed, deeply human characters who live rich inner lives in response to the powerfully portrayed social and emotional pressures the world offers them.  In addition, the possibility that Lina is a kind of alter ego for Elena or that they are alter-egos for each other, sparked my thinking.  That this split represents some kind of two-headed coin version of the possibilities open to women at this time was powerful and the idea that Elena was breaking free from the life she might have been forced into was redemptive.

There are still aspects of the plot that bore me.  The pattern of the two women getting together, of Elena being obsessively insecure and competitive, of them rediscovering their childhood bond, only to have Elena feel the need to separate again to avoid her guilt and her feeling that Lina is actually superior was repetitive and led to some skimming on my part.  I have now read almost twenty years in their lives and Elena’s response to her friend is essentially the same as it was when they met.  There is also still a random quality to the plot – incidents pile up and, while they have a cumulative effect on our understanding of the characters, few of them feel important in themselves.  There is little doubt that these patterns continue in the next two novels.   

But I have to confess that I miss these two girls, so I may continue reading.