Elena Ferrante - The Neapolitan Novels

really don't think complaints about denying us/taking away the pleasures of narrative neatness go with complaints about on-the-nose and it's a small world after all. As for the latter, she's been up front in interviews about 19th Century literary inspirations from early on (note that the little girls' big intellectual etc encounter is w Little Woman, and it's a long time before we get to mentions of any modern authors). Popular books that later became part of the canon were not above devices also used in schlock stage works of the time, or what we associate with soap operas, chick/dick lit etc (so Eliot kills off Casaubon at just the right moment; sucks for him, yay for us). Ditto Shakespeare etc--doesn't always work, but think EF redeems the use (no wrong notes, depending on what's played next)
Don't really want injections of The History of BASIC etc., which would seem like boilerplate, though could say lack shows limitations of first-person narrative, but the point of the latter is we don't really know whether Lina/Lila is " really"all that cracked genius or not (I've had the experience, a couple times, of finally meeting somebody my friends say is awesome, and thinking, "Whut?"). Point is the effect she has on others. Also she's a canary in the coalmine/extreme case re "dissolving boundaries," information overload, social implosions/explosions etc.

really don't think complaints about denying us/taking away the pleasures of narrative neatness go with complaints about on-the-nose and it's a small world after all

bro did you even read my post

In volume four Lina more than once provokes Elena with her claim that Elena's work is neither one thing nor the other: that it neither fairly represents the jankiness of life nor pulls any kind of satisfying novelistic clarity of through-line out of it. This claim is foregrounded and repeated enough that it seems a fair extrapolation that we're meant to look at the novel we're reading in these terms -- like ferrante is definitely rubbing the readers nose in the way she's both doing a bunch of unlikely narrative reconnections while also refusing certain others

Agree with that part, and Elena/Lenu's drive x insecurity about her own work and identity is related, connected to Lina/Lila's, one stays, one goes, the former comes back, because they both have to go round and round with this stuff, with each other, even when confrontation's in their own heads (finally externalized once again, via postal, at end).

personal politics eh

Didn't mean the Eliot etc or any of it as a lecture, just thinking loud x caffeine, sorry

that i was starting to query whether the book being a chore was getting in the way of my ability to focus on it (or anything else), or whether my inability to focus on it (or anything else) was rendering it a chore

this happens to me too

she talked quite a bit in one of those interviews about how it's also really the prose itself that counts, the sentences, the tone, language - having read 1-3 in danish and 4 in english, gotta say her voice comes through very clear in both translations, and I believe this is really a big part of how great it is - as thomp says, it gets under your skin/into your language

and that's one of the greatest thing writing can do

lol *things*

Come to think if it, if I'd read all four books in rapid succession, might have seemed like a chore at some point. Took me maybe 18 months, with gaps incl. waiting for US publication of the fourth.

i'm going to start with part 2. good idea or better start from 1? heart 2 was better..

i think ive posted already itt about how physically wearying i found reading these, although i also found them p worthwhile overall. theyre kind of dogged, almost nagging sometimes.

@thomp i disagree with how literally (or completely?) were supposed to take linas critique of elenas writing, i do think the failure of large parts of the narrative to cohere was successful in its attempt to be 'truthful' to our experience of life? punctuating with a qn mark since im uncertain of how i mean this, precisely

I think it coheres enough. Dealing with the onslaught of information (in media, in the streets, in relationships is one of the main themes, and Lenu's no genius at herding cats, we know that. nostromo, I can't imagine starting with vol. 2. You'd be constantly wtf, even more than otherwise, I mean. Maybe 2 is better for some readers, but 1 seems essential, as the genesis of so many situations in the rest of the story (and has an isolated fascination all its own, funky childhood teenhood neverneverland etc, later maybe more like Brigadoon).

Also agree with lamp re Lina's critique: right or wrong, she's never gonna let Lenu get too comfy. That would be bad for the writing, esp. if Lenu's greatest achievements, the Linacentric ones, of course, come from such tough love.

A guy I work with picked up my copy of volume two out of a lack of anything to do at that moment and read the first six or seven pages. His judgement: "so is this book, like, going to be about the mafia...?"

Another problem I maybe had is that I thought Elena-the-narrator was a total asshole.

I thought she was a pretty complex character

I didn't but I have a high tolerance for arsehole-ism.

Reading through today's interview with the FT

If I were Lina, I'd banish all first-person narrators, including the Unreliables. I often think they're overselling, but somehow Lenu's up-front anxieties don't have that effect on me. As Mary Karr teaches and demonstrates in her own memoirs, you have to lay it out there, but also leave room for the reader to judge, whatever that judgement may be. So, this is presented as such a memoir, confessions of, even, after one operatic collapse, "Today, writing this, I can smile at my younger self"---even better once we know she better smile while she can, cos Lina's not done with her yet." We see how younger self thought this or that was a good idea at the time; we also see some of the effects on her hubbie (Casaubon and yet not, an unexpectedly sympathetic figure in some ways, despite some dangerous tendencies/limitations) and especially her kids. So I don't think Ferrante would mind somebody thinking Greco is an asshole---poster child-to-woman in all the stages of social change, but still something of an asshole, if differently fucked up than Lina---she might even enjoy it (seems like there's a wicked sense of humor behind all this, though a serious one, too, like, "Whaddayagonnado? All I can do is write about it.")

most assholes are pretty complex characters imo

reading part 1. somewhere in the middle. nice enough but i can't see the greatness and can't justify the hype (yet?!)

Hm

I should finally be getting to the last part of this by next week.

Anyway revived because I am reading Peter Stamm and I think he is a pretty good for anyone looking for a similar sensibility crossed with a kind of intensity. I'll think more on this later.

ah, i bought a copy of Brilliant Friend last night.

i haven't read these yet, but i already want to read the fragments book. she's my kinda talker.

https://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-author-is-purely-a-name/

i might look for these books tonight. i have a chance to sneak into Amherst tonight, and i'm almost certain that Amherst Books would have them. it's a great store. within spitting distance of emily's house.

More Ferrante - its cool: https://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-author-is-purely-a-name/

so I should read these novels, right? I almost bought the first last month.

Only if you like what is behind the link.

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

Cool! I'm sick of reading Isherwood and about the CIA.

started the first book. bought them all. i love Amherst Books. such a great store. they had all her books. page-turner so far!

Finishing this soon-ish. Just to go back to this:

One thing I do think is kind of a major narrative failing is that Lila's success with computers is so half-assed, that Elena just tells us 'I don't really understand how that happened': why is the thing that eventually affords her some kind of escape given so much less space than 'The Blue Fairy', than the Cerullo shoe factory, than the Solara store?

There is a scene where the narrator starts comparing her and Lina's daughter as they sit. Lina is showing them the new personal computer. The latter is attentive and the former does not want to know and wants to play as normal. The level of anxiety that was already written about earlier -- is my daughter normal? is she stupid? -- is speeded up in this scene. Its true that the techie stuff is sorta lost, and we really don't know the division of Labour so much. According to Enzo and Elena its Lina this Lina that. She is a sponge that picks up anything and moves on to being better at it than you, which is yet another shade of the 'my perfect cousin' syndrome.

Started the first book too: a hundred pages.

50 pgs from the end - coming to the conclusion that a more pruned and powerfully concentrated book about Lila and the relationship between her and the narrator only - with men, work, children really away/at the background (or as simply talk between the two of them) might have been more: i) more amazing as literature and ii) would have sold 10 copies.

But I think there is a tension (perhaps unresolved) between the above and what we have - the 80s/early 90s just seem forgotten.

or was there a blackout? idk.

Finished this on the train. Then got in the Tube and someone was just starting vol.1 #proudFace

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.