Elena Ferrante - The Neapolitan Novels

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...

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??