“In the Margins” by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)

This is a collection of lectures written by Ferrante and given by an actress in her stead. Together, they focus on the process of writing, as well as the value of reading widely and deeply. Ferrante asserts, “The way we see ourselves dragging outside, by means of the written word, an imaginary “inside,” which is by its nature fleeting deserves more attention…. Everything begins with pencil and paper. Then a surprising split takes place: the I of the writer separates from its own thought and, in the separation, sees that thought…. When I write, not even I know who I am.”

Ferrante stresses that the task of writing begins with the readings that are already inside you. “My work, in fact, is founded on patience. I start from writing that is planted firmly in tradition, and wait for something to erupt and throw the papers into disarray…. The only thing we can’t do without, in literature and any other place, is form.” She begins her second lecture by musing on the phrase, taken from Diderot, to “tell the thing as it is.” She admits, “I didn’t know how to get an exact reproduction of reality, I wasn’t able to tell the thing as it was…. It’s arduous to speak truthfully, but you do your best.” Her breakthrough was realizing, “I will therefore try to tell it as I can, and, who knows, maybe I’ll get lucky and tell it as it is.” In her third lecture, she points to the fact that when her fiction finally separated from realism, it became no less truthful. “With greater or less ability we fabricate fictions not so that the false will seem true but to tell the most unspeakable truth with absolute faithfulness through fiction.”

For Ferrante, the acts of writing and reading are inseparable. “We have to accept the fact that no word is truly ours. We have to give up the idea that writing miraculously releases a voice of our own, a tonality of our own…. Writing is seizing everything that has already been written and gradually learning to spend that enormous fortune…. Thus when I talk about my “I” who writes, I should immediately add that I’m talking about my “I” who has read…. Thus writing is a cage and we enter it right away, with our first line. It’s a problem that has been confronted with suffering, I would say with anguish, precisely by those who have worked with the most dedication and engagement…. No language and no writing are made by themselves. That is to say: the scribe has to study and become so skillful that it’s almost as if the word, in becoming writing, were running autonomously from inside to outside, from the heart to the page.”

“The Story of the Lost Child” by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)

This is the final novel of Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. Ferrante is a master of writing about the details of human relationships. At the heart of these four books is the enduring friendship and competition of two neighborhood girls, Elena and Lila. “I told myself again that she would no longer exercise any authority over me, that that long phase was over.” The quartet began when they were six years old, playing with dolls on the streets of Naples, and finally concludes with the narrator, Elena, as a grandmother living in Turin, but still tied to Naples, both to the city and to her childhood memories there. “A woman without love for her origins is lost.” The breath of this story deals with the mimetic rivalry between the two friends, where the hopes and dreams of the one become entwined with the other, whether in the realm of toys, school grades, the affection of lovers, their sense of purpose in the world, or the love of their families.  “She had dragged me into the swelling sea of her desires.” The two women, even with grown children of their own, constantly measure their own lives based on the success of the other. “From childhood I had given her too much importance, and now I felt as if unburdened. Finally it was clear that what I was wasn’t her, and vice versa. Her authority was no longer necessary to me, I had my own.” They compete for the praise of the same teacher. They fight for the charms of the same man. And by the time of this fourth novel, as both have matured into adults, each successful in their own way, they compete for the respect and admiration of their old neighborhood. “I had no doubts about how I would react if I discovered that she really had irrupted into my professional identity, emptying it.” This tight-knit lower class community has followed both of their lives and judged their successes and failures to its own idiosyncratic standards. “I loved my city, but I uprooted from myself any dutiful defense of it.”

“Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay Behind” by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)

This is the third novel in Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. The two women, Elena and Lila, have both grown into married adults, but have also grown apart. Elena is married to a university professor and has moved to Florence, while Lila is working in a sausage factory on the outskirts of Naples. Elena’s novel is a huge, if risqué, hit, reviewed in all the major Italian newspapers. She travels the country, staying in fancy hotels, and giving lectures on her writing. But soon all is not well. After giving birth, she feels the strains of family life. Suddenly her leg begins to hurt, reminding her of her crippled mother’s, her baby never sleeps and refuses to nurse from her breast, and her husband is too distracted by his work to help out around the house. Despite all her worldly success, Elena is still shackled by the traditional roles expected of a married woman in Italy. Lila, meanwhile, struggles through her life in Naples, raising a child out of wedlock, and living together with an old neighborhood friend, Enzo, in an ambiguously sexual relationship. Power, sex, and tradition all intermingle as these women try to navigate and defy social expectations in post-war Italy.

What ties the novel together is the ongoing politicization of Italy. The country is being divided between the Fascists and the Communists. There are pitched battles in the streets every day. The universities have been taken over by radical students, who berate their own professors and spend all day out of class and plotting revolution. The workers in the factories are organizing, while gangs of fascist thugs, recruited from the slums, menace any leftist political gathering, carrying metal pipes and knives. One cannot help but have a political opinion. Italy is on fire and both Elena and Lila are caught in the middle. Despite time and distance, however, they cannot seem to break the childhood bond between them, for better or for worse.

“The Story of a New Name” by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)

This is the second novel in Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. It starts where the first novel ended and continues to follow the two girls’ friendship from Lila’s wedding day into their adulthood. Again, Lina narrates the story, but Lila figures as the center of her world. Lila has married young and moved up in the world. Not only is she a married woman, she is rich, at least by the old neighborhood’s standards. Her husband, Stefano, already owns two groceries and has just invested in a shoe factory in which Lila’s father and brother design their own brand. But the Solara brothers, with ties to the Naples mafia, are intimately involved as well. They seem to have their tentacles wrapped around every business opportunity in Naples, legal and illegal. By the novel’s end, Lila’s life has been turned upside down. Lila, despite being recognized as brilliant, quit school after eighth grade. Lina, meanwhile, through hard work and perseverance, is struggling her way through high school, learning to speak Italian without dialect, reading a daily newspaper for the first time, and is being introduced to people outside of the old neighborhood. The novel’s plot involves betrayals, love triangles, and much soul searching and inner angst. By the end of the novel Lila and Lena’s relationship has gotten even tighter and has become much more complicated. Lena has left Naples for Pisa, where she graduated from college, has become engaged to a bookworm philologist, and has had a semi-autobiographical novel published with the help of her fiancé’s mother. She has grown apart from the old neighborhood, but has she managed to truly escape it for good?

“My Brilliant Friend” by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)

This is the first of four books in the anonymous author’s Neapolitan Novels quartet. I cannot recommend this book enough. It details the intertwined lives of two young girls growing up on the streets of a lower class Naples neighborhood infested by the Camorra, as well as your run of the mill street thugs. The style of writing has been compared to Knausgaard in its detail, but I find Ferrante incomparably more readable. The psychological aspects of the friendship of two young women as they struggle with adolescence amid their toxic milieu add vibrancy to the most mundane of everyday occurrences. Lina is the homely, bookish narrator, somewhat in awe of her friend. Lila is the radiant star pupil, who also enchants with her rare beauty. She dominates and captivates Lina, who dutifully plays second fiddle in their friendship. There are rivalries between the two in school and in romance, but, through all their trials, there is a bond of love that endures. The quality of each and every sentence is impressive, reminding one of verse written as prose (if that makes any sense). This is a gripping tale as lovely for its descriptions as its story.