Elena Ferrante - The Neapolitan Novels

i read so much sci-fi so i'm right at home with the lack of precise descriptions of people, places, and things. which i guess i kinda expect in lit fic. those microscopic proustian evocations of past smells and physical details. hardly any food in this book so far. an ice cream. an image of a woman by the stove cooking pasta. a litany of items found at the grocery store or bakery. but i guess you have to save your strength when you have to detail all those past feelings and moods so minutely.

That sounds like something I might potentially like. I am not big on lots of visual description (maybe because I have aphantasia--hey, there's a new official name for something I've been interested in since high school).

Thirty pages from the end of the first volume!

But visuals where they count most, like a moment during the day Lenu spends out and about with her father, that one day in all their lives. Also the way things look with "boundaries dissolving," while Lina's flying through the air, after her father's thrown her out the window.

No surprise, saga seems suitable:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/10/arts/television/elena-ferrante-novels-destined-for-television-series.html?smid=tw-nytbooks&smtyp=cur&_r=0

started the 2nd book. ready for more.

I'm going to start the second book next week. The first one left little impression on me.

The hookup with her boyfriend's dad was well done

Really liked the first one, just finished the second and it dragged in the middle, I briefly thought it was going to go all chick-lit. Last 1/3 made good on the bleak and traumatic promise of the first 40 pages though. Bookshop owner told me the third one was the most light-hearted of the four - yay? - going to take a break though.

Are you still able to read, ledge? Because ...

Yeah, for a month or so...

It could be a long break.

Why did you think it was going to go all chick-lit and what do you mean with "chick-lit"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_lit - actually i probably meant more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mills_%26_Boon - just during the more floridly romantic passages on the holiday in Ischia, only a couple of pages and I knew it wouldn't last.

Scroll down for something amazing that did not quite happen:
http://www.westsidespirit.com/city-arts-news/20150819/new-and-in-charge-at-symphony-space

just finished the first one. thought it was really magnificent. really put me through the wringer in places: the constant atmosphere of male violence, and the oppression of poverty, the inexorable neighbourhood squabbles and feuds.

wonderful climax, the protagonist coming to a realization of not belonging to her neighbourhood by virtue of her intelligence and education. the very last part about the shoes at the wedding.

i can already tell that shitbag nino sarratore is going to be a shitty boyfriend

and stefano a shitty husband

I should start the second one in the middle of next week. I'm looking forward to participating, for at the moment I don't have anything but "It was OK" to write about the first.

i already like the 2nd book better. the aftermath of the party at the teacher's house - oof! such a huge thing for the narrator and lila just rips it to shreds in the car. ouch!

aha! or not.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/14/books/who-is-elena-ferrante-an-educated-guess-causes-a-stir.html?hpw&rref=books&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

He said he had embarked on his analysis after spending time in the company — or rather the shadow — of Ms. Ferrante last year, when both his novel, “Come Donna Innamorata” (“Like a Woman in Love”) and Ms. Ferrante’s “The Story of the Lost Child” made the five-book shortlist for the Strega Prize, one of Italy’s top literary awards. Both lost to “La Ferocia,” (“Ferocity”) by Nicola Lagioia.

so he was stalking his competition...

Jeff Vandermeer Googles her location:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CdiwRv2WEAAVryK.jpg:large

good post about the novels' covers:

Another way to put this is that the Neapolitan novels, which are about poor women with restricted access to education (and the class mobility that aesthetic taste enables), look like books that might be sold to poor women with restricted access to education. Note that literati readers love to identify with the characters, Lila and Lenu, who are women who use reading to escape their lives. So why are we so unwilling to consider ourselves to be anything like the women who are Lila and Lenu’s real world reading counterparts? Why are we so determined to stand against their reading practices and aesthetic tastes?

http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2016/03/25/this-week-in-ferrante/

nobody listens to me when i tell them this but you should read 'Days of Abandonment' first, Alfred. it's wild.

― flopson, Thursday, January 28, 2016

Took your advice.

very glad to hear it!

I've now heard this thing a few times about the covers -- I guess I don't get it, I feel like the covers are very subdued and look very much the way I expect "tasteful literary fiction" to look.

same

Seems like if Lina-Lila ever really thought she could "escape through reading," gave it up pretty early. When she eventually tunnels into the deep history of Naples, more like material for her secret writing and getting further inside the place and space she's never left, and tried to find a way to control (incl. reading early computer manuals), despite tirades about the basic chaos, and how everything else is a fuckin' lie.
The cover of the first one, with a stately marriage procession proceeding to the edge of a cliff, as good old Vesuvius drowses across across the bay, as usual, turns out to be very appropriate. Covers of the others, with generic greeting card romance, seem like more examples of that xpost Ferrante humor, considering contrast with contents.

I feel like the covers are very subdued and look very much the way I expect "tasteful literary fiction" to look.

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Friday, March 25, 2016 6:18 PM (50 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

same

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, March 25, 2016 6:23 PM (45 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

don't know that i agree. got any examples?

i'm not sure what "books that might be sold to poor women with restricted access to education" would look like. personally i imagine some raunch harlequin novels? that's probably classist and sexist of me...

the neapolitan covers look plain in a way that is not quite of this time, they make me think of like, the literary equivalent of old soap operas. but i don't associate that style with the covers of contemporary tasteful literary fiction. i'm bad at describing design but i think the trends in contemp lit fic book covers are like: stencils, rough textures, blurred photos of the sea or forests, the indie comics aesthetic...

http://slimpaley.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/donna-tartt-the-goldfinch-book-cover.jpg?w=870
http://media.npr.org/assets/bakertaylor/covers/t/the-flamethrowers/9781439142004_custom-7e81f0840812e7c2097afb8f1ed7955662489442-s300-c85.jpg
http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Wood-Best-Books-of-2015-1200x822-1451928637.jpg

don't care about covers tbh

i care about spines

yep!

I agree the cover doesn't look very "designed" the way lit fic from big presses do. I guess I'm saying it reminds me more of something you'd see from a university press. Like, isn't the cover type actually Times New Roman?

The point is, it's definitely not something that would be mistaken for "the kind of book marketed to poor and lower-middle-class women."

i paid almost 80 bucks for all four books so definitely not priced for poor people. i justified it cuz i only buy new books about once a year.

have now finished all four, best thing i've read in don't know how long

wonder what she'll do next

Is this a literary thing or more young-adult?

I loved Days of Abandonment, most especially because it didn't present its heroine as virtuous.

The covers look aspirationally literary. See my mom's bookshelves. My mom isn't a poor woman with restricted access to education, but she was once.

xp- i love how it's a book about a mother but it's not about being a mother; she finds no comfort in the love of her children. the kids are just background noise in the frantic haze, just another constraint in the balancing act, placed there to add to the chaos.

Is this a literary thing or more young-adult?

― calstars, Saturday, April 2, 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well its easy-to-read, but a lot of literature is easy to read.

Not long afterward, the underground war that occasionally erupted into the newspapers and on television - plans for coups, police repression, armed bands, firefights, woundings, killings, bombs and slaughters I was struck again by in the cities large and small.

Eh?

I presume the narrator's referring to the Years of Lead.

I presume she is trying to say "Not long afterward I was struck again by the underground war...", there must be a missing dash after 'slaughters' but even then 'in the cities large and small' is entirely out of place.

ows posted a link of commentary as it relates to Knausgaard, here is the stuff on Ferrante: http://173.254.14.229/2015/06/the-slow-burn-an-introduction/

Just read the first post, which is brilliant, thanks. Right about the resistance to settling on/into one identity, and reminds of EF interviews re finding the freedom of the two main characters (exchanging etc., as the commentator says here)(but also on and off what becomes their own tracks, as they live so long). Judging from excerpts of novels before this quartet, their one or dominant narrative voice was more like Lila/Lina, or maybe even like Lina/Lila and Lenu/Elena G. simultaneously, trapped in the same body---anyway, the two lifelines provide more range, it seems (though I'll have to read those earlier books).

Finished 3, the soap opera is strong with this one. As is the irony, that just as she is on the verge of becoming a feminist crusader, just as she realises what a chauvinist nino is being, just at the exact moment that she goes to give him a piece of her mind... she falls into bed with him. Ferrante sells it though. Certainly rings more true than the end of The Bostonians.

Yeah, for sure, but also, the husband seems like such a foole at first, and he is---but not, as also seems at first, lol Casaubon and he's done, son---no.he actually, maybe starting when he doesn't back down from the student---oops spoiler for others---well he has his own bit of dumb stubborness/luck--->saving grace under pressure=adaptablity---needs a whole lot more of this last, but---well, you'll see in 4. Also: her child-rearing, also her not child-rearing practices...

well this sucks

The allegation about her identity? I agree; it seems like a pointless violation of Ferrante's privacy.