Elena Ferrante - The Neapolitan Novels

off to naples in june so saving pt.3 until then. the scene in the factory at the end of pt.2 is just...

Shifting, for now, from the class strife of labor to that of competitive matriarchs with young mothers in play, new feminism (not topically contrived, seems natural), secret vision of the smarter Solare brother ( but with his own matriarch lurking in the shadows, finally glimpsed for a moment), a young husband who's kind of goofy but somewhat sympathetic then again can see how bad he might be up ahead...

Slamming into the finish today, unexpectedly. Guess I'll keep my mouth shut about the details, but amazing how some other characters feel the need to rise toward the absolute self-assertion that Lila exemplifies, in their minds--while she herself seems to want to keep a lid on things, becoming another hard-boiled matriarch of the old neighborhood (or so it seems). Maybe she'll even be the next Signora Solara, in terms of loansharking, anyway (the computer could come in even handier).
But it's also a matter of non-Lila/Lina pressures, even or especially on and in the self-obsessed, in the particular churn of 70s Italy.

Been a couple of weeks since I saw Lessing's Each His Own Wilderness, v in line with Angry Young Men in '59 type stuff (from my v thin knowledge of it) but also much broader range, given her political commitments and her views of relationships between men and women in those pressure cooker circles (if not in general). Nothing too new if you've read The Golden Notebook.

Put it here for the utterly warped and toxic mother-son relationship. Saw it as proto-Ferrante in the way it dealt w/resentment of motherhood, detailing how women sacrifice their intellect and other passions, slowly dying inside if they only focus on bringing up children..

i'm halfway thru #1 and i just wanna ask: are all three about lila and lenu?

y

Also, the forthcoming Vol. 4, most likely. But their worldviews expand and contract in various ways: for instance, in being and having children and parents, and in the way they influence (incl. manipulate) each other, and others, within and beyond the neighborhood.

Paris Review interview now online (and she's started following me on twitter---uh-oh):
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6370/art-of-fiction-no-228-elena-ferrante

Maybe she confused you with tattoo artist?

who?

who's the tattoo artist, I mean

I dunno I looked at your twitter and you had a namesake with that profession.

Your name plus a one ("1") at the end

*starts following Elena Ferrante*

Afraid I don't tweet or twitter. Any updates?

Her account seems to be a lot of re-tweets from other people's praise. Her own tweets are in Italian.

That interview was great, lots to say but I already said it. On twitter :-)

finished my brilliant friend the other day. completely adored it and can't wait to read the next. only caveat would be to suggest to ferrante-virgins: read days of abandonment first. they're both probably equally amazing but days just jumps out at you in a way the trilogy doesn't. it's like a fever dream, while the trilogy so far is actually pretty happy

jesus really? i'm nearing the end of MBF right now and the whole thing seems suffused with dread

my brilliant friend still has that hope springing from the upward trajectory of young life: lenu's academic progress, the cerullo shoe factory. also there's a beautiful, complex friendship at the centre of it. whereas days of abandonment is just 'husband left me and dog is shitting blood while i've locked myself out of the house' and the only glimmer of hope or friendliness is a sad, flaccid neighbour.

can't wait!

https://twitter.com/reynoldsmichael/status/601028422865915905

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1609452860/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1609452860&linkCode=as2&tag=conversatio07-20&linkId=5XDCXBIYPMGBKW5Q

the final part - its nearly here.

Saw that the other night

Automatic thread bump. This book is dropping next week.

— System

have received a copy of vol 4 through cunning means, but have not yet read vol 3, so my smugness is misplaced

you a lol blogger?

i have a well-connected and kindly cousin

Looking forward to part 4, should be out in Danish in spring 2016.

#1 remains my favorite and I'd rank them 1 > 2 > 3 but maybe 4 will wrap everything so nicely as to trump them all...

I've only read 1 and started 2. Feel like I should maybe reread 1 before proceeding further.

^ Yeah, same. I've read a couple chapters of the second. I liked the first, but just priority-wise I'm not sure if I want to keep going.

I mean once you get going on 2 & 3 they're real page turners, the writing is good and the whole milieu is great so def recommend them to anyone

long interview -

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/elena-ferrante-interview-the-story-of-the-lost-child
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/elena-ferrante-interview-the-story-of-the-lost-child-part-two

'the storey of the lost child' is probably the best of the four, searing, i think, its really incredible

have any of you read it? dont want to spoil it but have been dying to examine some of the pieces

Its good to know that you (who didn't like it as much as some of us) found this great.

I have seen this in the shops but haven't got it as I want to finish a couple of things first (funnily enough Mandelstam's Hope Abandoned does examine her friendships with Akhmatova and others too).

Please start talking about it. I just won't look at this for a while.

To wait for the Danish translation or buy the English version... that's a tricky question.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/joanna-biggs/i-was-blind-she-a-falcon

LRB almost never publish a review to coincide with publication..

i liked that review a lot although the parts about 'genre fiction' sent it (and me) off the rails. its one of the few that has mentioned what i think is most powerful and disquieting about reading them, their intense physicality, the way ferrante insists on the mind being bound to the body. i have a vague memory of feminist essay i read as a teenager where the author claimed that the astronaut in his spacesuit was the patriarchal ideal. pristine, white, mechanical, armored, divorced from the messy flesh of being. and i think its interesting to contrast the heaviness of ferrante's characters with the weightlessness of knausgård (to cast around for the closest example at hand). i had such trouble with the earlier parts particularly 'the story of the new name' because its wearying. walking up the last flight of tenement stairs after a long day of work. ferrante links the mental - art, friendship, intellect - to occupation of physical space in a way that seems radical, feminist.

idk theres a lot i liked thinking about here particularly the way that art forces coherence on life, that it attempts to coalesce, define boundaries, delineate identities. how false that can feel, how important truth is.

i lost my copy of brilliant friend somewhere :/

I am not sure I am getting where the shorter older stuff is more 'polished'. Both phases of her writing life present bks that are very fast and addictive as a read. To do with the short chapters and I also think she devised a bunch of characters and placed them in a universe that enabled her to write in this feverish mode for hundreds of pages...this comes back to the literary vs. genre opposition which the LRB peddles and I don't really like that.

That aside I liked the review.

Not read the bk or this artcile but love the headline:

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1604540.ece

Just finished (prob re-read some of) The Story of The Lost Child, and I predict another comeback hit for Elena Greco, which I hope she won't come to hate, as she says of her first comeback, A Friendship. Though she as her character/perhaps truest self yet, ends up on the page like she does (won't spoil, but she's somewhat bummed out/dissatisfied, as has often happened of course), hope she regards this as confessional validation, as much as possible, of her own worth, beyond being the well-scrubbed little girl from the ghetto who made good by following the now quaint rules for moderns, in a mediocre, backstabbing world. But of course, the Devil has the best lines.
Some of this Elena-Lenu x Lina-Lila (who seem to be merged in the voice of pre-Neapoliton Novels Ferrante, judging only by excerpts)may come from the back and forth of Anna the publicist, called Anita in the Neapolitan neighborhood recently visited (lost the link), and her novelist husband, or maybe not. But my experience in English makes translator Ann Goldstein seem invaluable, re the rough elegance and sometimes poetic turns of phrase, though the turns of the whole story must come through in the original as well, I assume---anybody read it in Italian??

I think this was at least *mostly* written by a woman, with husband or other editorial pushback/critiques, as every writer needs.

There's also the sense that, as Ferrante's referred to it in interviews, this is not a quartet, but one story (a multi-volume novel, like her childhood 19th Century heroes tended toward). So Elena Greco stops it at a good place, but it doesn't really seem like The End; she may still be writing, whenever there are new developments---but we'll probably (?) be left to speculate, as she does, and leaves spaces for us to do so in these books (so much detail, but she knows when to leave room for our brains, I think---def leaves a lot to be learned about Italy and everywhere else, no matter how much she says).

seems like this is everywhere lately

One of the big questions for up-from-the-bottom literary careerist Elena Greco is and always has been: how do you creatively represent/tap into your origins---semi-familiar to many, in terms of their undeniable churn, their real-life-whatever-that-is melodrama---without breaking faith, without (over-) exploiting the people you still care about? As a product of the 50s-60s-70s (etc.) American Deep South, I def get some of the problems of this Southern Italian, especially when---well, I don't want to be accused of spoilers (not that most of this turned out like I expected).

Greco's doubts about her own degree of artistic achievement, incl. integrity---oh yeah, and basic (?) talent, esp. compared the self-semi-tutored genius and/or charisma of you know who---are presented as plausible and entertaining.

seems like this is everywhere lately

― hot doug stamper (||||||||), Tuesday, September 22, 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Good.

Reading book two - immediate punch in the face, every paragraph feels like it's one word away from exploding violently. The first one set this up so beautifully and here it's just one KO after the other.

On my paperback cover a quote by a critic reads "Imagine if Jane Austen got angry and you'll have some idea ..." - I don't get it.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/03/this-best-selling-author-is-still-anonymous.html

Reading this at the mo - for literary tourism its pretty good.

Made me laugh:

(Why is Shakira always on the radio in Southern Italy?)

Nice this quotes Shirley Hazzard - whom I am reading (though its not been a great week for reading anything) - Bay of Noon is another Naples book.