Elena Ferrante - The Neapolitan Novels

Also, her page over there says:
http://www.europaeditions.com/author.php?Id=17

She received a PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award and was a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome. She is currently editing the complete works of Primo Levi, for which she received a Guggenheim Translation fellowship.

Reached Adolescence last night. Loved the part about studying for the Latin test,to pick only one thing.

If I find paper copy of Days of Abandonment I can mail it to you, don.

Thanks! But I think I should start w My Brilliant Friend, based on descriptions. 'Bout to order it

...thus continuing under the banner with a soup-stained device: "One book by everybody."

lol.

About 2/3 of the way through that one now.

After I'm done with this, wondering if I should start on the second one or finally get around to Knausgård.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/21/women-on-the-verge

Above placed here for future reference, skimmed the beginning very briefly.

Wow. Didn't see it coming. On to the next one, I guess.

99p on kindle at the moment.

Friend of mine is on the third one. Says she wants to go to Naples to eat, same as Camilleri made her want to go to Sicily. Me, I still have to make some headway into the second one.

NYRB also gets busy on it.

The fourth book in the Naples series has just appeared in Italian and is scheduled to be published in English in November 2015

Wow, not going to read until I finish because spoilers.

Finished the third book last night. Now to wait a year to read the last of these. Roll on Nov '15.

About 1/2 way through My Brilliant Friend, to where they (especially Lila) dance the new thing, the rock and roll, and there's a huge confrontation among the guys and all the girls defer bloody denouement by bursting into tears---even Lila does this, and even the narrator has ever seen her do this, so maybe even more huge. Love this:
I think its perfectly reasonable to think that Lila could've been a pop star. She is v punkoid. She (as conceived by Elena) is a hurricane of creative energy. She disrupts, says no, rebels, never forgets, you can physically beat her (although if you aren't careful she could knife you) but she'll pick herself up and try again. I don't believe this trilogy is 'an evolution' in her work. I have read a few of Ferrante's other books and the voice and authority and themes were fully formed (I can believe she probably was in her late 30s early 40s or older when she started writing) from pretty much day one. But in this series she is finding another framework, and it really is in the creation of Lila that she is finding that something extra and why these novels may endure.

― xyzzzz__, Saturday, November 1, 2014 6:18 AM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
Also, re "something extra," note the tough probing realism also leads to Lila's mention of her panicky visions of people places things (esp. the first) losing their borders, and her impressions of the street while flying out of the window via her father, and the narrator's own description of the waves, when first seeing the sea (via her own father, the one day they ever spent together, and free of their neighborhood selves' emotional stew).

"even the narrator has NEVER seen her do this," of course.

and the narrator's own description of the waves, when first seeing the sea

Yes I loved that scene. The NYRB review mentions it too.

Making my way through Elsa Morante's Arturo's Island. Its a similarly brutal book. Can see what Ferrante took from her.

Mentions her in the Q&A - which is great.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7f1c9ed4-4269-11e4-9818-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3NEM0bdQA

Struck by neither girl knowing about 30s-40s Italian history 'til Pasquale denounces Don Achille, and then is made to explain his terms---the girls are 12 then, I think, which would be 1956. Their official schooling includes Greek and Latin, and some ancient history, but nothing at all recent, it seems. (There are just a couple of hazy references in passing, to somebody older having been killed in an air raid, a kid who touched an unexploded bomb...) I was reminded of this when reading last weekend's WSJ book reviews, incl. quotes from The Third Tower, about visiting Fascist Italy, "an aesthete's paradise, " but also "The newspapers appear not to be written by journalists, but by celestial angels...a dying man's vision of heaven." This Never-Never Land leaves behind the shaky Now which the girls' older relatives and neighbors try to live in, as much as possible. A few people have tried to go forward, to expand their businesses, mainly, but mostly it hasn't worked out, so far. Even punky, too-smart-for-her-own-good Lila actually wants to stay in the neighborhood, to make it safer...but once she and the narrator learn to read and express themselves (to themselves, as well as others)in Italian, not just dialect, look out.

There is another passing mention, of a name learned in school, Comandante or Commandante Somebody, who seems to be or to have been in charge of Naples or Italy (not Mussolini, but still with a military title)--again, just kind of a vestige.

i read days of abandonment this spring and it was one of the best things i've ever read. this sounds dumb but it made me feel really strong emotions, just spending a week living every thought shudder and curse of a dejected wife and mother's lonely walks and paranoid screeds. the scene with the dog at the end is a masterpiece of building tension, almost unbearable at times, but i stayed up until like 4 am that night. i remember it as a sweaty, queasy, and unmistakably italian novel. bummed to hear that people aren't feeling this trilogy, but if it is anything like knausgaard then maybe it's nothing like abandonment because that book is the complete opposite of knaus

Think most everybody on this thread enjoys the trilogy, and I'm looking fwd to Days

And everything else by her

sick. you're gonna love days, dow

Even punky, too-smart-for-her-own good Lila actually wants to stay in the neighborhood, to make it safer...but once she and the narrator learn to read and express themselves (to themselves, as well as others) in Italian, not just dialect, look out Code-switch sparks already flying upward in first chapters of The Story of a New Name: even the title might be referring to this in one sense, switching from ref to fateful married-lady name. Lenu tries to say something conciliatory to her boyfriend, but it comes out in that there fancy-ass Italian, more salt in his wounds! While Lila spits the ghetto pepper at just the wrong moment, to just the wrong person----don't want to drop any spoilers--will note that her silence can be a problem too, and Lenu maybe for the first time specifically articulates something at least implied in the first volume: "The photographer had been fortunate. I felt that he had caught the force that Stefano had talked about; it was a force---I seemed to grasp---against which not even Lila could prevail."(Though obv. in some sense she does prevail. since the whole series begins, is provoked by, her 66-year-old punkoid acting out). Also, contemporary politics are just starting to get closer to young adults' POV, via possible or supposedly possible business deals.

Also, the Truth, via dirty dialect, can be too much, too lucid and too lurid to let yourself believe. Ditto even just the plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face truth, in basic Italian or dialect: to the right person at the right moment, "You're just like your father"is an elephant tranquilizer.

I really 'preciate the fact that the author isn't playing any coy shell games re an Unreliable Narrator: right from the beginning of the first book, we know that she is recalling events filtered through decades, generations really, gradually reeling in the years, avoiding tangles with all the mad skills and gifts that she and Lina were born with and to, inextricably---the webs are deep enough, without any tangles. She's also (in case Lila's really finally pushed luck and everything else too far this time) recreating life in words vs. death---incl. "reducing it to words," as she describes Lila's own writing at one point, recreating violent crimes from newspapers, as a way of setting her own, then-currently plausible fears and speculations down in manageable containers. And/or revving herself up for whatever might be required to get Lila out of a jam one more time, or at least wrap her brain around it (figure that's the subject of the final volume, the English title of which will be The Story of The Lost Child, I think).
Also, she drawing on long-ago memorized pages from Lila's own notebooks, plus conversations with their other friends from childhood, whose further entanglements with L. developed while the narrator wasn't present. The differences/attachements between Lila, as the rest of the neighborhood calls her, and Lila, the side of her named that by the narrator alone. get more and more dynamic (aside from the very brought married name). And of course the narrator (who forthrightly acknowledges that her own voice as a writer always has notes of Lila is )named Elena, same as the pen name of the author, who seems to be cultivating, harvesting her own Lila-ness, the truth-bringing outsider, probably far beyond the career of the in-book Elena/Lenu. but we'll see(maybe schoolteaching, b-plus writer Elena Greco gets a creative breakthrough/bust-out best seller from her memoirs and the real Lila shows up again, and the narrator diligently inspects her for "you owe me" vibes)

very *fraught* married name, that is.

Also, speaking of suitable containers, and challenges, can see how wrangling 60s computers, another bit mentioned at the beginning of the series, will prove worthy, at least for a while: looks like Lila's punk spirit will go proto-cyberpunk, even got the grunge city surroundings of 80s per-se cyberpunk (although I can't help remembering "We would say study even when reading a science fiction novel"---zing, ouch! Have mercy, ladies)

The early days of IT consulting bit was amazing and totally unexpected direction for the book to take.

I am just two thirds through 'My Brilliant Friend' and enjoying it. But I'm also finding it ... stark? Moving very slowly, at least, though not unenjoyably so. The dalliances of the courtyard and the adolescent romantic hijinks aren't to me adding to much, and it reminds me often of film more than literature. I've felt (obvious) connections to I Vitelloni, a whole catalog of Spanish bildungsroman, and even, some Bergman and Fassbinder. But I'm also intrigued by the way in which the book is both picaresque and modernist. I'll read the second one, 'though I may need a palate cleanser in between.

i used commas like an amateur

I hate commas! The first book takes them from early childhood to 16, a densely packed passage for anyone anywhere, and maybe especially for a couple of wired, brainy girls pushing through that neighborhood. The second book goes from 16 to 23, and is maybe even slower, but roomier,warmer, and somewhat less (or differently) frenetic. They're growing up absurd, but they're growing up.

The early days of IT consulting bit was amazing and totally unexpected direction for the book to take. Right, and I've recently been reading about what an ironic turnabout the current sexism of Silicon Valley is, since so many of the early programmers were female, and the orginal computers were too: lady calculators, doing their lacy maths, and engineers were the hardy, practical men. (So the original sexism of pre-Silicon Valley, but also a striking transition, in terms of trusting/depending on female smarts in the modern world. The earliest ads for "business machines" I've seen all feature women in elaborate Victorian/Edwardian office attire, smiling like Mona Lisa as they operate very complicated-looking gear;)

People should read Ellen Ullman's novel 'The Bug' for more on that (70s/80s era)

There is the IT element but also the consultancy element but there would be spoilers in talking about this as it doesn't come in till the 3rd volume.

I've felt (obvious) connections to I Vitelloni, a whole catalog of Spanish bildungsroman, and even, some Bergman and Fassbinder.

Which Spanish bildungsroman (one of the finest words in any language huh?) would you be referring to?

I finished watching Fassbinder's adaptation of Berlin Alexanderplatz recently and I can totally see it (Bergaman too in Cries and Whispers??) The recurring theme of domestic violence, the idea that actually getting away from that particular place (which does not happen in Berlin) is the best thing these people can do.

I don't know who could play Lenu tho'?

So Lenu's memories---used for what seems more and more like autobiographical fiction, novels-within-novels---are filtered through first-person testimony, from her own experience and that of mutual friends, also gossip, and the pages of Lina's notebooks, long-gone but once memorized (all of the above "reduced to words," as she describes the secret side of Cap'n Ahab Lina's lifelong efforts to contain and control chaos), *as well as* the author/narrator's own reading, watching, listening to other voices, other artful and/or entertaining constructions. As anyone's are ("If we write about this," my friends and I agreed when the Big Thing happened in high school, "It'll likely be some more end-of-the-innocence shit." Respect for reflecting and getting past or deep into that, Elena/Lenu).
Of course, she's also got the diet of your basic late-20th Century/early 21rst media chowhound, and that of a media professional, who may sometimes still feel like the scholarship kid from the backstreets, forever catching up.
Would like to see this as a four-season miniseries, though might have to be online, since not sure if will be enough boobs 'n' blood (prob former, suspect not the latter) for HBO/Showtime.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6370/art-of-fiction-no-228-elena-ferrante

she has such a great voice

put a hold on the first of these books at the library then i noticed i was 86 in line wow

just finished days of abandonment and it was quite something. the scene in carrano's apartment is just

have a week in greece in april & I'm saving part 2 of the neapolitans for that.

"the land that feminism forgot" indeed. eek

the relationship with her kids is so well drawn and close to being genuinely disturbing as it increasingly seems like she will abandon them (or worse). thought her final judgement on her husband was especially brutal too

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-22/reviews/those-like-us/

Started as soon as you posted the link and immediate lol:

If Starnone is behind Ferrante’s work, I would like to meet him. No man I know would write so well and not take credit for it.

Re xpost pioneering female IT

Jennifer Ehle retweeted
Andrew Rader ‏@marsrader 7m7 minutes ago

Margaret Hamilton next to Apollo flight computer code she hand typed @MIT to help send humans to the Moon in 1969.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CC0swqEWIAEaYez.jpg

How much of that code she also wrote I dunno, but some killer typing yo

Started Those Who Leave And Those Who Stay a couple days ago, rolling waaay into the first third on the Ferrante Express. Lenu's olfactory sense is working overtime, also she wonders if she gives off the erotic charge she's increasingly getting from so many of her peers in the heat of verbal battle (getting to be more than verbal over on Lina/Lila's turf). Seems really unusual, at least in any contemporary fiction this promoted, to foreground the nuances and trajectory of students and workers, arguing and otherwise struggling toward a common cause, common action, choosing and swept along.
So far more use of small-world coincidence than expected, but it's working.

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...

i for one am taken aback by the assertion that a collaboration necessarily involves a man

Long piece that makes the case for Ferrante being either Starnone alone or Starnone and Raja in collaboration: https://lithub.com/have-italian-scholars-figured-out-the-identity-of-elena-ferrante/

I hadn't thought of it being Raja and someone other than Starnone---another woman, maybe?
Was thinking of science fiction writer Lewis Padgett, AKA Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, who are also thought to have contributed to some of each other's stories published under their own names.Judging by those, Moore likely was the one who took Padgett stories higher and deeper, while the generally quite capable Kuttner was the relatively dry, ground level structure guy.
I tried Googling this, but Moore and Kuttner are the only ones I knew:
https://www.google.com/search?q=husband+and+wife+writing+team+under+pen+name&ei=uWopYpO7GIHK_Qb77q3ADg&oq=husband+and+wife+writing+team+under+pen&gs_lcp=Cgdnd3Mtd2l6EAEYADIFCCEQoAEyBQghEKABMgUIIRCgATIFCCEQoAE6BwgAEEcQsAM6BggAEBYQHjoICCEQFhAdEB5KBAhBGABKBAhGGABQ3xBY63hg9o8BaAJwAXgAgAG1AYgBvwmSAQM0LjeYAQCgAQHIAQjAAQE&sclient=gws-wiz

(I haven't read nearly all works under those names, but so far seems like Moore was at her amazing best publishing as herself.)

twist ending where it turns out that Raja wrote the Ferrante novels alone, the novels published under Starnone's name were collaborations between him and Raja, hence the similarities

Long piece that makes the case for Ferrante being either Starnone alone or Starnone and Raja in collaboration: https://lithub.com/have-italian-scholars-figured-out-the-identity-of-elena-ferrante/

― Zelda Zonk, Thursday, 10 March 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Thanks for that piece, it was good to see a digestible write-up of those linguistic comparisons I've heard about.

If Starnone could write like Ferrante/Raja I guess I just don't get why he would write like Starnone

but that's just me, found Lacci very inferior to any Ferrante

or well at least any recent Ferrante, will admit it took her sometime to master her craft

The novels pre-quartet are best. Ferrante then departs from that, and it's good...but where both Starnone and Ferrante achieve a mind-meld is in the middle.

Though all of this is based on one Starnone novel, need to read more.

in the middle of what?

Of her career as a novelist.

In The Margins, out today---have any of these essays already been published? Looks appealing, but seems like a lot of you were disappointed by the collection of her columns.
From Europa Editions announcement:
Here, in these four crisp essays, Ferrante offers a rare look at the origins of her literary powers. She writes about her influences, her struggles, and her formation as both a reader and a writer; she describes the perils of “bad language” and suggests ways in which it has long excluded women’s truth; she proposes a choral fusion of feminine talent as she brilliantly discourses on the work of Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Ingeborg Bachmann, and many others.
Here is a subtle yet candid book by “one of the great novelists of our time” about adventures in literature, both in and out of the margins.

guessing a lot already released in Frantugmalia, but that's huge

the columns were not bad, but they were just columns

really I come for the novels

I find the Lithub piece pretty unpersuasive - seems like litfic pizzagate to me. "If Starnone could write like Ferrante/Raja I guess I just don't get why he would write like Starnone" seems otm.

Lol pizzagate is a bit strong

Stuff like this just seems... silly?

Georgios Mikros from Athens University, for example, used the textual corpus to train a machine-learning algorithm to profile authors (that is, identify their gender, age, and provenance) with a high degree of accuracy. This algorithm concluded that the person behind Elena Ferrante was a male over 60 years old from the region of Campania.

There was another long piece in (I think) the NYRB that linked Ferrante to Raja not through computational analysis of writing styles but by following a money trail from Ferrante's publisher to Raja. But as the Ferrante novels are so Naples-specific, and Raja was brought up in Rome not Naples, it seems pretty likely that even if Starnone is not the primary author, he at least has some input.

Judith Thurman summarized it in The New Yorker:

In 2016, Claudio Gatti, an investigative journalist for Il Sole 24 Ore, a business newspaper, claimed to have unmasked her. He had hacked into the royalty statements of Ferrante’s Italian publisher, Edizioni E/O, a small house to which she has been loyal. Inexplicably vast sums, he discovered, had been paid to the account of Anita Raja, a translator from the German and an E/O stalwart. Raja, who is sixty-seven, was born in Naples, her father’s native city, but grew up in Rome; her mother was a Polish Jew who had escaped the Holocaust. If she has published fiction,he has never signed any. But her husband, Domenico Starnone, is one of Italy’s most prominent men of letters, whose best-known work is set in Naples, where he was born into the same generation and class as Lenù and Lila. He has vehemently denied having written or co-written Ferrante’s novels. Yet if their author is a man he has pulled off one of the most improbable—not to mention galling—impersonations in the annals of fiction. So that makes the idea of collaboration seem plausible, and I can imagine him Naples-izing her ideas, also maybe applying his pre-existing skills, which work better, maybe, with her leading the way, or just in the back-and-forth.
But also: maybe she's taking the money to someone else, the true collaborator with Starnone, or other(s).

I tried Googling this, but Moore and Kuttner are the only ones I knew:

Nicci French (domestic thrillers) is a husband and wife team

TIL!

Stuff like this just seems... silly?

Georgios Mikros from Athens University, for example, used the textual corpus to train a machine-learning algorithm to profile authors (that is, identify their gender, age, and provenance) with a high degree of accuracy. This algorithm concluded that the person behind Elena Ferrante was a male over 60 years old from the region of Campania.
― Chuck_Tatum, Thursday, 17 March 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Do you think questions like 'Was Homer the author of both Iliad and The Odyssey?' are silly?

I know that isn't in the same ballpark but some people have a curiosity about the people they are reading. And if it turns out Ferrante isn't quite what it's claimed people will be pissed off about it.

I guess for me, there is a big leap from "X is similar to Y" to "X contributes to Y" or "X is Y".

There are so many ways a couple can influence each other's writing: sentence style, editing style, sense of humour, history, likes, kinks, pecadilloes, etc. This is normal. The Ferrante issue seems wedded to rather old-fashioned sexist assumptions about female authorship (also a problem for female musicians, sports people, scientists...) and the equally questionable idea that appropriating stories from other people's lives somehow lessens you as an author.

There's no gender/authorship issue in Homer AFAIK

Funnily enough there is.

https://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/authoress-odyssey-1897

"and the equally questionable idea that appropriating stories from other people's lives somehow lessens you as an author."

iirc I don't think -- in that lithub piece, anyway -- there was an attempt to lessen Ferrante. You could argue this kind of thing could enrich.

"to train a machine-learning algorithm to profile authors"

the desire to know more abt an author isn't silly but the idea that this kind of phrenology-by-robots is any use *is* p silly: it's crappier and more speculative than most forensic and profiling cop science, and we now know that most forensic and profiling cop science is also garbage (up to and including fingerprints)

plus it's done by robots! famously not good at reading novels well imo

Funnily enough there is.

https://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/authoress-odyssey-1897

ha! that is great

xposts

Re: appropriating, I guess it's the assumption that an author has to have lived through something (e.g. been raised in, as opposed to just being born in, Naples) to write about it. And therefore anyone who *has* been raised in Napes (conveniently a dude) must QED have written the book or part of it

plus it's done by robots! famously not good at reading novels well imo

― mark s, Friday, 18 March 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Don't think the robot is reading a novel. The lithub piece describes a study where they look at phrases from Ferrante against author a, b, c etc. This analysis took out everyone except Starnone.

There was then a horrible tabloidy investigation years later that pointed to Raja, who is married to Starnone. So in this case it looks like the robot did its job.

I could see how some readers would find it galling, as xp Thurman says, if Ferrante turned out to be a male author with no female input, although of course Raja could be giving him all manner of feedback, guidance, notes, without having the final say, putting down phrases in analyzable way----but I'm always more interested in what's on the page or other medium (controversies in music and visual arts too)

Very excited for this translation of Starnone.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/06/02/boy-remembers-his-fierce-father-rich-family-novel/