The Neapolitan Novels

Like millions of others, I found Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and and Those Who Stay, The Story of the Lost Child) to be fully absorbing and addicting – I don’t say riveting, as many times I alternated between can’t put it down and can’t keep reading. The four books comprise a single, long story of the lifelong, deep and conflicted relationship between two girls, Elena (or Lenù), the narrator, and Rafaella (Lila).  The girls grow up in a poor and violent neighborhood of Naples, from the 1950’s to 2014  – the pervasive violence is not always due to the activities of the camorra, the “secret” crime syndicate that was widespread in Campania, but is embedded in the families and neighborhoods, and especially in the relationships between men and women. 

I was angry.  I said, “You want to use me to con them?”

She understood that she had offended me.  She squeezed my hand hard. “I didn’t intend to say something unkind.  I meant only that you are good at making yourself liked.  The difference between you and me, always, has been that people are afraid of me and not of you.”

“Maybe because you’re mean,” I said, even angrier.

“Maybe,” she said, and I saw that I had hurt her as she had hurt me.  Then, repenting, I added immediately, to make up: “Antonio would get himself killed for you: he said to thank you for giving his sister a job.”

“It’s Stefano who gave the job to Ada,” she replied. “I’m mean.”

The relationship between Lenù and Lila is synergistic – on her own, Lenù is book-smart, but a striver, who says she is only fully alive and most creative when working with, or stimulated by Lila.  In contrast, Lila is strong, exceptionally creative and fiercely independent, but seems to seek and need the validation of her accomplished friend.  And their lives and friendship are framed in the books within the larger currents of Italian political and social life, which are fully and grippingly explored.  Still, there are key events in the books whose meaning and significance I cannot quite grasp but which remain in my mind long after closing the books.  Fascinating books!

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Jude the Obscure

This book, exploring some of Hardy's ideas of marriage and class relationships, was infamous when first published - widely denounced and sometimes burned.  Hardy said that the attacks "completely cured me of further interest in novel-writing" (though he had apparently been thinking of turning almost exclusively to poetry anyway).

Two themes are dominant - the idea that the legally-binding nature of marriage destroys true love and friendship, and that the inaccessibility of university life and learning to those of lower class is ill-founded and destructive.  Jude Fawley, a thoughtful, sensitive, fair-minded person with ambitions to intellectual attainment is the hapless victim of a scheming woman who, once they are married, quickly abandons him.  Jude later falls passionately in love with his cousin Sue, who he believes is his soul-mate - a free-thinking, courageous, independent woman.  Jude is a good man with a strong moral sense, a fiercely independent thinker, with advanced but sensible and kind ideals, and with unwavering devotion to Sue.  Unfortunately, as Jude recognizes, Sue is "a fool! - And she's an angel, too, poor dear!"  Eventually, they live together as man and wife, but without formalizing their "marriage".  The novel is the story of how this highly unorthodox relationship leads to their ruin:

To indulge one's instinctive and uncontrolled sense of justice and right, was not, he had found, permitted with impunity in an old civilization like ours.  It was necessary to act under an acquired and artificial sense of the same, if you wished to enjoy an average share of comfort and honour; and to let loving-kindness take care of itself.

This is a strong, interesting and thoughtful book.  I greatly admired Jude and was absorbed in the exploration of his personality and outlook, but for me, the oversensitive and indecisive Sue was an especially maddening character. Though shocking at the time of its publication, dramatic changes in society have robbed the story of a great deal of its power.