[This 2013 novel is the third in the ‘Neapolitan quartet.’ I read it in sections, writing about each section before reading further. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
29 September 2024
Chapters 1-24 (of 123)
At the end of the second book in the quartet, The Story of a New Name, Elena Greco’s novel has just been published and she is in Milan speaking about it and signing copies. But before returning to the same event now, Ferrante presents a kind of prologue, in which Elena describes the last time she ever saw Lila five years before. They are in their 60s, there’s nothing left of the beauty Lila possessed as a girl—and they happen upon a stark memento mori. A woman has collapsed and died on the street, and they recognise it as the now obese, ruined Gigliola, a beautiful childhood friend of theirs. The conversation isn’t easy after that, Lila telling Elena to leave the past alone and, especially, warning her never to write about her. ‘I’ll come look in your computer, I’ll read your files, I’ll erase them.’ Elena tries to laugh it off—she can protect herself—but Lila smiles her old, mean smile. ‘Not from me.’ It’s a phrase Elena tells us haunts her as she takes up the narrative again. When could she ever protect herself from her friend?
Now, Elena is in her early twenties. All around her, things are changing. Or things stay the same. The changes she finds herself being immersed in are to do with the political turmoil of 1968. Students and young intellectuals in Milan look to events in Paris with a kind of awe, and seek to replicate what they see as the first steps towards revolution. Alongside all this, and seen as a part of it, is a sexual revolution that some see as a natural adjunct to it. At one point, an artist expects Elena to let him into her bed with no prior acknowledgment of her as a person of interest in her own right. She is appalled, and as she sends him out of the shabby guest room she is in he dismisses her as a hypocrite. Elena is slowly, slowly coming to realise that this is what doesn’t change in 1960s Italy. This is what men are like….
Almost everything that happens in this first part of the third novel arises from these interrelated things: Elena’s own novel, soon to become a cause celebre in the newspapers for its notorious scene of sex on the beach; Italian men—say no more, for now; and a new politics of sex in which the winners never seem to be women. The chapters are short, around five pages, and most of them are no more than a single scene—an evening and night she spends with her prospective sister-in-law’s big, shabby house, scene of the nocturnal visit from the pushy artist, is spread over five chapters. Most of these episodes lead Elena to a new understanding of some aspect of how things work in the world she finds herself in… which is useful, but can feel schematic. This Bildungsroman sometimes feels like a step-by-step guide, with Elena a self-doubting Candide wondering at the scale of what she has never realised until now. It isn’t that she was born yesterday, it’s just that sometimes the dawning of understanding seems to take some time….
Why not start at the beginning? Her novel, which sounds somewhat like a cut-down version of the first two in the series we’re reading, is semi-autobiographical. The notorious beach scene is a close cousin of Elena’s own experience with Sarratore, Nino’s father, in The Story of a New Name. But Elena Greco’s is published in the 1960s, which is why its frankness is condemned by the self-styled arbiters of taste and morality on one side, whilst being celebrated by modernisers on the other. In Ferrante’s scheme, these two sides are neatly pitted against each other in the opening chapters, set in the bookstore. A reactionary professor scorns not only its sensationalism but also its lack of good style. Elena, always prone to bouts of impostor syndrome, is mortified—until a young man comes to her rescue and argues on behalf of its freshness and honesty.
It’s as though Ferrante has decided to distil the era’s literary controversies into a single confrontation. And guess who Elena’s rescuer turns out to be? It’s Nino, of course, and his solidarity gives Elena enough confidence to stand up for herself. Or, as she puts it—I’m paraphrasing—she is able to try out the jousting skills she’s learnt over the past few years to show that she’s no pushover. By the end of the episode she’s feeling pretty good. Adele Airota, her putative future mother-in-law, has facilitated the book’s publication and arranged the publicity event, and she invites Nino to accompany them to the restaurant. Poor Elena—she is as in thrall to Nino as she ever was, and walks with him. Will she go to bed with him later? She will if she can, despite the company she’s in. This, remember, is the man who left her best friend with an infant only a few weeks old, and the other woman in the group is the mother of the man she, Elena, is hoping to marry. Sex, eh? She’s constantly wrong-footed by it—not that it’s her feet she’s thinking about. Nowhere so far from the seething inner core of her being.
However. Adele has promised a final surprise for Elena on this memorable night. A special guest, late because of the terrible traffic on the way from Pisa, is… Pietro, her fiancé. So now Nino talks to him and the other man with them, a different professor and a friend of Adele’s who helped get the book published. It’s the clever argumentativeness of the bookstore all over again, with the same competitive edge. Does Elena take a part in it? Up to a point, but the night is over for her. Walking to her hotel with Pietro, she knows that he’s ready to go to bed with her if she’ll let him—something they have never done—but tonight, he isn’t what she wants. He’s still her fiancé, and she has to assure him she still wants to marry him—he’s still an intelligent, kind, good man. But tonight? No.
In the hotel elevator, the professor tries to kiss her. She’s appalled all over again, fights him off, and he is full of apologies. But my God. She can’t wait to get back to Naples, where she is spending some desultory time in her childhood home now she’s finished at the university. And it’s time for some different set piece scenes. She has no contact with Lila again, following the awful encounter at the sausage factory at the end of the previous novel. But her old life haunts her. When she tells her mother that Pietro would never marry in a church, she is scathing, a threat of violence bubbling under her rancour. And Elena’s day is about to get worse. The unnamed professor from the bookstore has written an attack not only on her novel, but on her personally. For him, she represents the raucous band of half-educated new writers with no sense of the finer aspects of literature. Part of the snobbery is class-related, so poor Elena is trapped. A part of her is never going to be allowed to forget the class she has spent years of her life trying to leave….
Her impostor syndrome nearly crushes her. The professor is right, and a conversation she has with one of the boys she grew up with seems to confirm that the only thing people want to talk about in her book is the smut. Gigliola, who lives next door, tries to tell her how remarkable she is, but it’s no good—until, the next day, there’s a rebuttal of the professor’s article in another newspaper. Adele and the publisher are soon making excited phone calls to the neighbour’s house, about how the publicity is working wonders on the sales figures. And Elena is learning another lesson about the real world, as a kind of culture war is fought around her. She isn’t exactly disgusted, but very little of her original intentions is being discussed at all.
Whatever, it’s getting her noticed, and getting her some respect among slightly more progressive thinkers. Including Nino, always lurking somewhere in the background. She doesn’t see him again in these chapters, but she thinks about him a lot because a) she never stopped, b) he’s publicly on her side in her little culture war, and c)… I’ll get back to c), because it’s a big one.
He isn’t the only man in her past life to appear, either in the flesh or in her thoughts. The two parallel bits of Bildung that are going on in these chapters are the intellectual, obviously, but also the sexual. Her experience before now is limited. Antonio, her first boyfriend, wouldn’t go the whole way when she wrongheadedly wanted him to in order to achieve some kind of equality with the just-married Lila. Then there’s Sarratore on the beach, of course, in another wrongheaded attempt to raise her self-defined sexual status. At least she isn’t a virgin any more…. Then comes Franco Mari, her first and only sexual partner in Pisa—but, as is the nature of things in her self-eradicating way, there was always something incomplete about the relationship… (If I remember rightly, she never really knew why he ended it.) Eventually she goes for the option of allowing Pietro to patronise her and tell her—without defining his parameters—how great she is. Just not great in the way he is, already a successful academic—he has a tenured post in Florence—in his early twenties. It’s all terribly problematic…
…and it’s this point that she goes back to Milan, to give some talks to women students. There’s plenty of unsurprising self-doubt going on, as she wonders whether the reactionary professor is right about barely educated, unrefined girls in their badly-made clothes. But it’s 1968, and she suddenly finds herself in a room full of mainly men, arguing about the way forward if they are to achieve the same revolutionary outcomes as the students at the Sorbonne have done. It’s in this scene, although she (or we, or both) only realises it later, that the political and the sexual come together first. There are young women there, almost always under the protection of men… but there are exceptions. Three women are careful to stay independent, protecting one another’s backs as they move through the heaving bodies. There’s Mariarosa, Pietro’s sister and always projecting confident self-possession. (Inevitably, Elena feels invisible and can’t get near to her.) And then there’s a startlingly attractive young woman with a baby, somehow an image of motherhood and what it means to be a fully rounded woman. There’s a slightly older man who seems to be making sure she and the baby are OK….
But Mariarosa does see Elena, and she invites her home, with the young mother and the 30-something man who both know her already. In fact, they live there in a set-up Elena can’t quite figure out. When can she ever? She also invites Franco Mari—Italy is a very small village in this novel—now an activist who had surprised Elena when he arrives to speak at the political meeting and… and, again, Elena is lost in the newly-formed etiquette of Leftist solidarity. There’s no particular set-up, she later decides, just free-ranging friendships and sexual partnerships. But, as ever, there’s the thing that doesn’t change. Juan and Franco joust over political issues, excluding the women as they always do. Elena is disappointed by Mariarosa’s apparent acceptance of this, and speaks up, against Franco. There’s a charge in the air, and Elena wonders whether it might be sexual. Will she sleep with Franco tonight? Would she want to?
But he goes to bed with Mariarosa, even though he’s only their guest in the house. Juan, the 30-something artist, looks daggers at them as they go to her room, and Elena draws her own conclusions. Juan and the young mother, Silvia, are definitely not an item in spite of his protective presence at the sweaty, somehow sexually charged meeting—which is why he later tries his luck with Elena in the early hours. She can’t sleep after that, and spends the night in female solidarity with Silvia. She, Elena, is good at calming the baby boy, and feels the kind of visceral link to him that only a woman can feel. I’m paraphrasing—but, as she thinks about it next day, she comes to a new realisation about men and women. Silvia had mentioned the name of the child’s father—it’s guess who, doing exactly what he did to Lila all those years ago—and Elena is electrified and appalled.
But. Her conclusion, in her not yet fully-formed 1960s mindset, locked in in one of the most patriarchal societies in Europe, is not necessarily what the reader might expect. Nino isn’t the stereotypical serial seducer to her. He’s the living embodiment of the kinds of human urges she’s been feeling for herself ever since she got to Milan. But she doesn’t think this at first. After all, he’s wrecked Lila’s life, he’s wrecked Silvia’s and who knows how many other women’s—Mariarosa tells Elena how the women throw themselves at him—and on the train back to Naples she thinks hard about his behaviour. ‘The thing offended me, as if Lila were squatting in a corner of my mind and I felt her feelings. I was bitter as she would have been if she had known, I was furious as if I had suffered the same wrong. Nino had betrayed Lila and me.’ A realisation comes to her—one which, as so often, has taken its time reaching her consciousness. ‘Nino was not fleeing his father out of fear of becoming like him: Nino already was his father and didn’t want to admit it.’ You don’t say?
‘Yet I couldn’t hate him.’ In Milan, ‘Sex had pursued me, clawed me, foul and attractive, obsessively present in gestures, in conversations, in books. The dividing walls were crumbling, the shackles of good manners were breaking. And Nino was living that period intensely. He was part of the rowdy gathering at the university, with its intense odour, he was fit for the disorder of Mariarosa’s house…’ and so on. He’s the perfect embodiment of the times and, somewhere in the pit of her womanly self, Elena is OK with it: ‘a part of me, at the thought of how much Nino was loved and how much he loved, had yielded and reached the point of admitting: what’s wrong with it, he enjoys life with those who know how to enjoy it. … I realised that precisely because all women wanted him and he took them all, I who had wanted him forever wanted him even more.’ Ah. Elena Ferrante is doing her best to explain the inexplicable. Why on earth do women love men like the utterly self-centred son of his father, Nino Sarratore?
And there’s another thing—which is how the chapter ends—what on earth, if anything, is she going to tell Lila? She’ll come back to Lila in the next section, devoted to a catch-up of what’s been happening to her since she became a worker in the dreadful sausage factory… but for now, there’s a kind of coda relating to Elena’s exploration of the vexed question of Italian masculinity. Is her fiancé Pietro any better than the others?
It’s more than a coda, because it moves the plot forward to a point at which Elena’s family are ready for the marriage to take place. It takes three chapters, and Pietro has to pull out all the stops, particularly in the uphill battle to get Elena’s mother on his side. He visits Naples, staying at a hotel not too far from the Rione Elena grew up in, and Ferrante covers a lot of ground. Class, the unthinking acceptance of religious cultural practices, working class versus middle class attitudes to masculinity are all covered, and we see how well Pietro is able to find a way through. He’s thoughtful, clever, aware of the differences between himself and the men that Elena grew up with… so his visit over about three days goes as well as it possibly could. By the end of it, Pietro is arm-wrestling with Elena’s father and brothers and, although they joke at his lack of strength, they completely accept him. Even Elena’s mother has been persuaded that while a civil marriage isn’t what she wants, he’s a good husband for her daughter. Too good, she implies to Elena—just look at the size of his nonna’s ring!—but that’s a different matter.
Is Pietro presented as a kind of ideal of what Italian men could be? Not really, because the world is what it is. He’s had the most enlightened, liberal education anyone could hope for—and, in the Italy of the 1960s, he’s almost as much of a Candide as Elena is. He’s 23 years old, but when some Neapolitan students in a restaurant start to mock his unkempt, bushy-eyebrowed—and entirely non-macho—appearance, he doesn’t even realise they’re doing it. Elena’s brothers respond in the standard Naples fashion, and Pietro is bemused. Outside, ‘he said ironically: Is this a local custom, you suddenly get up and start hitting the people on the next table?’ He’s found a way to cover his separation from them, as usual, but it shows how far he is from their experience—and Elena’s.
Whatever. He moves to Florence, he finds a tiny apartment—and then his mother steps in. It’s how the educated middle class works—she knows somebody who would be able to find them something much better for the same rent. And, of course, her taste is what governs the new décor and furnishings, however much she might pretend to ask Elena’s opinion. She will definitely be marrying Pietro, and if she has thought about Nino since her return from Milan she hasn’t said anything…. But ‘I was sure that I loved him’ (Chapter 23) doesn’t sound like the kind of visceral passion we know—and she knows—is a big part of herself.
Chapters 25-45
This is Lila’s catch-up section. It’s some time after Pietro’s visit as Elena re-tells the account Lila gives her in a long, dark night of the soul. Lila is living with Enzo now, after he has rescued her from the nightmare of Nino’s hasty departure. It’s he and Pasquale, their old friend—and now a communist organiser—who come to fetch Elena because, in her desperation, Lila has asked to see her. Elena sets up her recount with a preamble: ‘This may be the last time I’ll talk about Lila with a wealth of detail. Later on she became more evasive, and the material at my disposal was diminished. It’s the fault of our lives diverging….’ This is both a warning not to assume that we will always follow Lila’s life so closely—hardly a surprise when they both have 40-odd years to live yet, and we’re in the third volume now—and something else. The ‘detail’ Elena mentions is a full-on novelistic narrative, every conversation and shade of emotion closely described—and t might be the most schematically presented 80-odd pages in any of the novels so far.
Eighty pages from a single night of reminiscences? Ferrante’s intended outcome here isn’t realism but something else. Elena’s own recent experience has been a series of lessons in how things work in 1960s Italy, but mainly focused on a middle-class world. Lila’s life as a worker in a factory riddled with corrupt and exploitative practices is in a different world entirely. Or the same world seen from a different perspective, as Lila becomes a working-class Everywoman. But there’s a spin—she is still Lila, so she isn’t going to accept anything lying down. She might tell everyone, including herself, that she is just trying to earn enough to live, but once the activists get to know about the conditions in the factory—because, at their prompting, she tells them—she’s immediately in the middle of a storm. Within days—the action covers a lot of chapters, but that’s just Ferrante’s painstaking style—things have become so ugly she reaches breakdown point and leaves her job. She wanders around the city, almost stunned, and that evening she tells Enzo and Pasquale to fetch Elena.
I mentioned what I call Ferrante’s schematic approach. Maybe she needs it to fill in aspects of women’s experience that Elena has no idea of. The domestic lives of working women; the exhaustion that means relaxation and thinking time are only to be dreamed of; the corruption that means so-called inspectors of factories are in the pockets of the owners, and working conditions are dreadful; the sexual harassment that is a part of women’s everyday lives. And meanwhile, we see how the radicalisation of the campuses is crude, so students do no more than make trouble through impulsive, poorly thought-out confrontations. Elena had despised the arrogance and assumptions of the male-led political factions. Lila despises their dilettantism, intruding into her life as if it politics were some childish adventure.
But I need to rewind. Lila is having the kind of life we glimpsed at the end of the second novel, working in a particularly disgusting sector of the food industry. She’s in a sausage and salami factory owned by Bruno Soccava’s family and managed by him. Outside the factory she is a woman in charge of running a household. Enzo is good to her, but she doesn’t sleep with him. All her love—little enough of it, most days—is given to Gennaro, the son she had with Nino. She does her best with the boy, but he’s with neighbours all day, and she’s tired when she gets home to spend time helping Enzo with the diploma studies he’s doing—so she feels her best is not nearly enough.
This becomes clear on the fateful night that kicks off all the trouble she gets into. Pasquale is visiting the house often, to keep Enzo on-track politically and to keep in touch with both of them. They are going to a meeting with some student activists, and Lila goes, with little Gennaro. It’s a typical Ferrante situation when they arrive—at the house of Professor Galliani, the teacher who took Elena under her wing after Lila had already left school. Elena had invited her to a party at this house in the first novel, one in which Elena is tentatively trying to stretch her wings while Lina makes a big show of finding it all terribly tiresome—despite the thrill she gets in this middle-class bubble of earnest respect for learning and debate. The professoressa doesn’t recognise her now, of course, and her discomfort only worsens when la Galliani’s grandson arrives with her daughter-in-law, accompanied by her son Armando. He, of course, is the brother of Nadia—she who had been Nino’s girlfriend until Ischia, in the second volume. (Try to keep up.)
The grandson’s arrival, with his precocious good manners at three years old, and his reading ability that outshines Gennaro’s at five, bring it home to Lila that Gennaro doesn’t stand a chance in this world. If Ferrante has a checklist of points to be made, that’s definitely one ticked off. Lila herself couldn’t progress at school largely because her parents didn’t want it and she didn’t push for something she knew nothing of. Now, here is her son struggling because he doesn’t have the same life chances as the nicely brought up kid.
But the meeting with the students is the real crux of these chapters. Reluctantly at first—she feels no great respect for these dilettantes who know nothing of working life—she tells it how it is at Soccava’s. She really gets her teeth into the way Bruno behaves now. He had been the polite, considerate friend of Nino’s on Ischia, the one who shyly pursued Elena and tried to propose to her. Now he regularly exercises his own take on droit de seigneur in the salami drying room. We’ve seen his attempt there with Lila, witnessed her threats to him if he so much as lays a finger on her, but at the meeting Lila speaks for all the women. And the men. There’s favouritism on the one hand, threats and the worst jobs in the factory for those who make trouble…. And she does her best to describe the endless, exhausting grind of it all.
The students, and others at the meeting, are sympathetic. But that doesn’t prepare Lila for some of them distributing anti-capitalist leaflets at the factory gate a day or two later—which include, without her permission, a near-transcript of what she had said at the meeting. Then things move fast. Bruno calls her in, and she tells him she had nothing to do with the writing of the leaflets—she wrote nothing. Then, next day, the fascists turn up—she knows the leaders from the old days in the Rione, all the usual suspects—and they start to beat up the students. But Pasquale and others arrive, beat up the leader… and things escalate quickly. The communists smash the windows of the hated security man who uses his power to do intimate searches, usually of the most vulnerable women. Police sirens are heard, everybody leaves—and Lila scurries into the factory. There’s no respite there, of course, and Bruno is almost apoplectic. (Not quite, yet—that comes later.) Lila fears for her job, but Bruno isn’t going to sack her.
Pasquale had lent her some pamphlets on workers’ rights which, of course, she had ignored at first. But then she reads them, and becomes an organiser herself…. So you can see what I mean about Lila the Everywoman—and Ferrante’s determination to tick all the boxes. It’s like the history of late 1960s activism in the workplace in Italy—which means that soon the biggest elephant in the room is going to start making itself felt. Lila has—after ignoring most of the advice of the local union man—written a page of demands to present to Bruno. But she is wrong-footed. On the morning she is about to present it to Bruno—always ‘Soccava’ to the workers—he calls her in. And there is the man, ubiquitous in the Rione and, it seems the whole city, that she never wanted to see again. It’s Michele Solara, owner of the shops she had worked in and helped to design. The scene is a set piece. He speaks to her as if they are old friends, all the time letting her know how people she knows have had to give in to him and his money. These include her brother Rino, now working in one of his shops, and others he’s simply bulldozed into the ground.
What’s his game? Does he really want her to come and work for him again—he’s extravagant in praise of her in patronising asides to Bruno—or, as becomes clear when Lila almost spits her disgust in his face, is he just there to tell her how things really work in their part of Italy? Bruno’s family doesn’t own the Soccava factory, he does. And if she thinks she’s going to change anything with some placards and unrealistic demands, she’s living in a fantasy world. This is how the big families run things, so she might as well give up.
And that, reader, is what she does. The hardships of the last five years have taken a terrible toll on her physical and mental health. Recently, she has been waking in the middle of the night no longer sure what is dream and what is reality—and at a recent meeting with the activists she had become so faint Armando had asked to do an examination of her in the next room. He suspects a heart murmur, recommends a hospital appointment—and she pretends it’s nothing. Now, after the brutal meeting with Bruno and his de facto boss, she’s had enough. That’s when she walks out, leaving Bruno shocked that she would dare to do it. Now, her health is in danger and she’s so mentally drained she had recently, just once, asked Enzo’s permission to get into his bed, simply to be close to somebody.
There’s a kind of coda. Elena tells us she had been a quiet listener, deliberately letting Lila say whatever she needed to. But she describes two interruptions she had made or, rather, clarifications about an important aspect of their lives. Sex. Lila is frank, as she always had been—Elena reminds us of the brutal details Lila had given of her wedding night—but the language they have at their disposal becomes a barrier to intimacy. Lila’s coarse dialect vocabulary isn’t right for these conversations, but nor is the polite terminology Elena could use if she chose. She says something she realises must seem unhelpful: ‘It isn’t like that for me.’
But it makes Elena wonder why things should be so different for her and Lila. She genuinely begins to wonder whether Lila—or Gigliola for that matter, who had remarked on the ‘dirty’ sex in her book—had ever had a pleasurable sexual experience. Sex is a duty, or a means to an end, and the pleasure Elena had felt in her life, and had described in her book, is something Lila doesn’t relate to. Had Nino been right when he had said that Lila was bad at sex? Or, Elena invites the reader to wonder, are things at the time in such a state that sexual pleasure is something women don’t even expect? Ferrante has Elena make explicit in her explanation to the reader what she can’t explain to Lila, about how women can take charge during sex. Elena knows from her own responses, even with Nino’s father, that sexual arousal and pleasure can be real for women, but she can’t even begin to explain it to Lila. And it becomes another layer in Ferrante’s exploration of the state of gender relations in Italy, at all levels of society.
Chapters 47-61
‘In the time that passed between that night and the day of my wedding … I tried to do all I could for Lila.’ This almost throwaway sentence isn’t really any preparation at all for the fifteen chapters in which Elena details all she does. It isn’t only about helping Lila—something which, this being Lila and this also being Naples, eventually blows up in her face—it’s also about Ferrante getting us up to speed on a lot of other people’s stories. It’s like a ‘previously in the Rione’ catch-up, as Elena tries (and fails) to speak to Michele Solara and, instead, gets the stories of some other people she’s almost lost track of. Their different takes on Michele give Elena, and the reader, a far better insight into his character than we would get from the man himself.
But first, Ferrante keeps the Bildung thread going. Elena uses Lila’s experiences in the factory as the basis for an article her publisher suggests she write and, after some vaguely flirtatious remarks from an editor, she gets it published in l’Unità. This is the Communist paper, and the people in Milan love it. And Pietro loves it. And—my goodness, she’s really arrived, she thinks—Franco Mari likes it. That phone she put into her mother’s house has never had so much use, and the ripples it causes lead to more articles. This is exactly what a right-on author needs to be doing.
Meanwhile Lila needs medical help and, inevitably, Adele Airota pulls some strings. Ferrante turns it into a satire on different class expectations and assumptions. For these scenes, Lila plays the part of an expect-nothing, just-get-on-with-it working class woman who can’t see the point. The consultant who examines her heart speaks only to the neatly dressed, nicely-spoken Elena—you can imagine how Lila responds to this—and tells her there is nothing wrong with her heart. But she is undernourished and overworked, and recommends a ‘neurological examination’—which Lila takes as an affront. Elena manages to drag her to the neurologist, but he’s useless. He finds nothing wrong with her, recommending the kind of walking holidays and retreats only appropriate for his wealthy clientele. And he’s outside the chain of favours Adele can muster, so Elena ends up paying. How we laughed—and Lila is through with the Airotas’ supposed help. Except… she wants to know about the new contraceptive pill, and the neurologist knows someone. She and Elena go to see a doctor—a woman, obviously—who is willing to give them a prescription.
Elena, when not fretting about her own status in the Airota family—is she just someone from the wrong kind of background they can show off about nurturing?—is pretty proud of herself. She’s getting her name into the papers, and she’s feeling good about how much she can help Lila. She writes of how ‘everything became fluid, almost as if I possessed the art of making events flow like water from a spring.’ She phones Bruno Soccara and is confident in telling him if he doesn’t pay Lila what he owes she’ll get a lawyer on to him. The lawyer is a contact of Pietro’s—this, Ferrante continues to insist, is how it works—and so is a tame computer expert who can give Enzo some proper advice about what he should be looking for. Like, IBM are about to open a new factory, and ‘the Naples branch had an urgent need for operators, keypunch operators, programmer-analysts….’ Things really do seem to be going well—except we know by now that whenever Elena thinks she’s doing OK she’s actually riding for a fall. You just wait.
Next. It’s time for Elena to tidy up some loose ends before her own wedding. ‘I planned to go and see Michele, Alfonso, Gigliola, and Marisa, supposedly to offer congratulations and to explain that I would not be in Naples when the weddings took place but in fact to discover if the Solaras and the Carraccis still wanted to torture Lila.’ It turns into a dark and tortured day of revelations. She goes looking for Michele first, but only finds Rino in one of the shops. He’s hopeless, trying to tease her as though she’s never left, so she tries the Solara house in the Rione. She is redirected to his upmarket new apartment—but only his fiancée Gigliola is there. (She’s the one who, only a few weeks ago, was running to fetch Elena to take calls on their phone.)
At first Gigliola puts on a sort of performance, boasting about the views, the big rooms, the brashly expensive furniture and the rest. But the pretence falls away and she begins to go into a (perhaps implausibly) frank confession about her own unhappiness. Ferrante needs her to give the low-down on what it’s like to be the wife-to-be of a local boss, and it’s no fun at all. She’s just an accessory he needs, and he’s told her ‘she was nothing to him, he hadn’t put her on a pedestal, she wasn’t the one he loved best, so she had better not be a pain in the ass, believing she had some rights. Brutal words.’ It gets worse. The woman he loves is Lila, because she is everything a woman can be. But not for the usual reasons: ‘women for him were all games with a few holes for playing in. All. All except one. Lina was the only woman in the world he loved—love, yes, as in the films—and respected.’ Lila isn’t like the 122 women he’s told Gigliola he’s had—she uses a much more brutal word—because Lila is special.
Not for the first time in this novel—joining the other times in the earlier ones—Ferrante wants us to understand that Lila really does have a kind of superpower. She has a uniquely sharp intelligence, easily cutting through to the essence of anything she turns her attention to. Michele had said this to Gigliola, so it isn’t just Elena who thinks it. It’s another reminder that in a different world, she could have been somebody. Of course, it’s a confirmation for Elena of her own sense of inferiority, an idea that crops up later. Even though in this section Elena is finalising what she told us much earlier about losing proper contact with Lila, she doesn’t want us ever to forget that conviction of hers. Lila is the brilliant one—if not so gentile, as the Italian title has it. Both words have an ambiguity about them anyway….
But Elena’s dark day continues. She tries his now very upmarket shoe shop, only to find another childhood friend there, Alfonso. He’s almost as bright as Elena—they used to compete in high school, and he was fine about her getting better marks—but now he’s stuck managing a shop. This chapter continues the theme both of the irresistible power of Michele, the would-be Don, and of the stifling little world of the Rione. First, though, there’s further confirmation of Lila’s special quality. Elena, ‘inevitably,’ mentions her and Alfonso is flustered. Stefano, her estranged husband, is Alfonso’s brother, but things are complicated: ‘he didn’t want to speak ill of her, or of his brother, or Ada,’ but he struggles to explain what is different about Lila. ‘Estrangement and belonging, an effect of distance and closeness at the same time. … It’s hard to say: you and I became friends immediately, you I love. With her that always seemed impossible. There was something tremendous about her that made me want to go down on my knees and confess my most secret thoughts.’ My goodness.
Elena really is doing some catching up today. Whatever next? Alfonso’s bombshell, that’s what. Careful readers (i.e. not me) will remember that Alfonso always was, and still is, handsome and lovely. But it was the more ‘manly’ Antonio who became Elena’s first boyfriend. (See My Brilliant Friend. I realise now that I read that novel nine years ago, so it’s no surprise I lose track.) Now, Alfonso has been engaged to Marisa, Nino’s sister, for a long time—and she, unlike the hesitant Alfonso, wants to move things on. Guess who she goes to see to put some pressure on him, pressure we already know has resulted in a wedding date being set. She talks to Michele, of course, and he sorts it for her. And can you guess what Alfonso’s bombshell is? Of course you can. He’s ricchione—a far more brutal term than gay—but here he is now, trapped with a fiancée who, he now tells Elena, is pregnant. He doesn’t say who the father is, but he’s just finished telling her, ‘trying vainly to hold back tears,’ how impossible it is to go against Michele. Whoa.
Can things get any uglier? ‘The long day passed in that way, without rain, but dark,’ and she’s had enough of the Rione for now. But reader, this is the world Lila wants to come back to. Enzo is willing to go along with the idea and Elena—she must still have been in full-scale fixer mode at the time—has found a flat that will be suitable for them. A family we know—does it matter who?—are leaving, and the endless round of musical chairs—flats, jobs, friendships, relationships—carries on as always. How will Lila and Enzo get on? We don’t know, but there’s a further development to come because Ferrante hasn’t finished with Elena’s unsentimental education yet: ‘then began a reversal that rapidly changed a phase of apparent growth in the relationship between Lila and me into a desire to cut it off and return to taking care of my own life.’
It’s one of those times when Elena, or Ferrante, initiates a new development by announcing the outcome—not that we haven’t known for a long time that Elena and Lila are going to see far less of one another in their middle years. It’s going to take four chapters for this one to unfold, and it doesn’t so much tie up loose ends as leave them feeling wounded and raw. First, despite Elena doing her best to advise Lila not to return to her old neighbourhood, she’s definitely going to do it. And something seems cemented in place—it’s one of those novelistic moments when you think, ah, I see what you’re doing here—when Lila accidentally meets the mother of Ada. Stefano had gone to live with Ada after Lila left, and now they have a daughter—and Stefano’s mother can’t get over how Gennaro looks exactly like her. And don’t they both look just like their father?
Lila sees it—‘they’re like peas in a pod!’ Gennaro was never Nino’s son after all, not the child of the super-bright man who does for women what Lila herself seems to do for all the men she meets—and who got out of the Rione as fast as he could. No, Gennaro is from that fixed neighbourhood stock that stays exactly where it is. Lila won’t hear any arguments to the contrary, and Elena almost despairs. ‘If that new conviction helped her to feel better, good. And if it was another sign of her instability, what could I do?’ Elena feels herself getting lost in a spiral of lives she can do nothing to influence.
But there’s another encounter—so many encounters in these chapters—that is even worse for Elena. Before she moves away from Naples for good, she would like to see Professoressa Galliani. Rather lukewarmly, she invites Elena to come over one evening, and to bring Lila if she wants. Oh dear. errante decides to put all Elena’s insecurities to the test in one awful visit. First, la Galliani isn’t there, but Nadia is—and so is Pasquale. They now seem to be an item, and Nadia seems to agree with his scornful take on what Elena has tried to do for Lila. Basically, she has done that middle-class thing of making a few calls, whilst changing absolutely nothing in the way things work. Inspectors? Don’t make him laugh—and the only good thing about the Unità articles is what Lila contributed. The rest of them? Typical playing at politics.
Then la Galliani arrives, in a bad mood. She bustles Elena and Lila into another room, and begins to undermine almost everything she can about Elena. She shows no interest in the book—Elena had naively hoped she would want a signed copy—and implies everything she does is simply climbing the social ladder. Marrying the son of a famous professor? Nice move. Soon, she is talking animatedly to Lila, practically ignoring Elena. And Lila seems to conspire with the professoressa, feeding any prejudices and not backing Elena up at all. Will she be going to Elena’s wedding? She wasn’t invited. (She was, after she had pointedly asked Elena, then had laughed sarcastically and refused.)
It’s no wonder Elena has had enough. La Galliani hardly offers a civil goodbye, whilst she embraces Lila. On the way home, Lila talks about how badly the woman had treated Elena, suggesting how she must be jealous of her success, in contrast to her own daughter’s drift into student politics and an unsuitable relationship. She doesn’t stop, all the way to where they part, and Elena can’t tell her how angry she is with both of them. ‘With her, there was no way to feel that things were settled; every fixed point of our relationship sooner or later turned out to be provisional; something shifted in her head that unbalanced her and unbalanced me.’
On the night before she leaves, she can’t sleep, mulling particularly over what Pasquale had said—was he right?—and she goes for a walk. It doesn’t help. She had done all she could for Lila, ‘not because I thought I would be fixing all the broken things of the world but because I was in a position to help a person I loved, and it seemed wrong not to do so. Had I acted badly? Should I have left Lila in trouble? Never again, never again would I lift a finger for anyone.’
She doesn’t mean that. Or does she?
Chapters 62-78
The wedding takes place, and it’s the beginning of five years or more of unhappiness. Everything about the marriage is unsatisfactory, from the dull, painful sex—Pietro is an inexperienced lover who has no idea what Elena or any woman needs—to immediate pregnancy, an unendingly fractious baby… and so on. In these chapters, Ferrante makes it sound like what it is, a depressing, demoralising plod. Elena, narrating it for us, turns into the bore we can’t get away from, because that’s what depression does to you. She had left Naples feeling wounded and undermined, and the new life she had hoped for doesn’t materialise. Pietro isn’t an interesting man, Elena is too tired to even think of writing—and there’s always the faintly troubling background noise of her relationship with Lila. When Adele finally realises what’s happening and gets Elena a nanny, the book she finds the time to write is dreadful. Lila, for once in her life, tries to be tactful. When Elena tells her to stop it, she does, and Elena decides she’ll never write again.
These are lost years, and I’m guessing that the realisations Elena comes to are a necessary stage in her development. That impostor syndrome of hers—I’ve mentioned it twice already—comes about because somewhere inside herself she knows that she’s always playing a part. From her teens, she was learning how to present herself as the person she thought people would want her to be, from Professoressa Galiani to Nino to Franco Mari and the Airotas. Now, through these early years of her marriage, she comes to realise what Lila has always known. It’s a charade, and she shouldn’t be doing it. What she’s finding more difficult to take on is Lila’s brutal-sounding assessment of her failed second novel and, while she’s at it, of her first: ‘You mustn’t write those things, Lenù, you aren’t that, none of what I read resembles you, it’s an ugly, ugly book, and the one before it was, too.’
This is the key conversation in these chapters, not because it resolves anything but because Elena begins to realise that she as important in Lila’s life as Lila is in her own. Lila isn’t enjoying saying these things—‘strangled phrases, as if her breath, light, a whisper, had suddenly become solid and couldn’t move in and out of her throat’—but she has to say them because it’s in Elena’s power to do what she, Lila, cannot. It’s as though everything in all the novels has been leading to this point. The doors all close for Lila, the one with the mental superpowers who can see through the nonsense of it all. Elena is the one who has to carry the standard—but, by this point in the novel, she is convinced she can’t do it on her own. She really believes that without Lila she is nothing.
This is only one thread, and often Elena and Lila don’t phone for months. Looking back to Chapter 64, I noticed this: ‘What a tangle of threads with untraceable origins I discovered in myself in that period….’ It’s one of those throwaway sentences that doesn’t really prepare us for what’s to come in the next fifteen or so chapters. Things start well, up to a point. She isn’t feeling good about Lila after her sense of betrayal as she left Naples, and the wedding day seems to confirm new possibilities. The Airotas invite a lot of people from their smart set, and—with warning bells sounding in the reader’s head—she spends more time with the professors and journalists than with her own family. She’s holding her own in their conversation, she thinks—and, of course, it’s an illusion. They leave, never to be seen again, because these are the friends of Pietro’s parents, not his own. He is no more established in their circle than Elena herself.
Elena has to find her own way, because Pietro locks the main part of himself away from her. He tries to do university life by the book, but that isn’t how it works and everybody finds it hard to get along with him. The only reputation he does manage to build is abroad where, I guess, his writing speaks for him. Meanwhile Elena, ever more heavily pregnant, throws herself into the kind of political activism she discovered in Naples. She stands on picket lines, talks to party organisers and trade unionists, writes articles, all the while wanting to let Lila know that her dire warnings about the horrors of pregnancy were completely wrong. She’s living her best life.
And then she isn’t. We know the pattern by now, and we aren’t a bit surprised by the crash that follows. Their daughter, Adele junior—always Dede from now on—spends a year making Elena’s life miserable. She won’t feed, so Elena is forced to use bottles instead. Inevitably, she feels guilty, her swollen breasts are painful, and she’s exhausted through lack of sleep. Pietro is away in his own world and lets her get on with it… and so on. Sex? Forget it. Eventually, things reach a head. Adele senior moves in temporarily—Elena’s own mother had been offended when Elena had said from the start that she didn’t want her there—then finds a nanny. So all’s well, yes?
Nope. Elena has lost her writing mojo, finds it hard to take an interest in anything much… which is when she persuades Pietro to start inviting university colleagues over for dinner. When he does, Ferrante can have Elena try out a new way to mess up. Several times, she flirts so shamelessly that the man she’s interested in phones her the next day. Occasionally, she will meet for a coffee, but that’s as far as it goes. Usually. But… with one of them she’s within a hair’s breadth of going the whole distance, until she pulls back just in time. Clearly, that’s not the way—and she goes home to drag Pietro to bed for a night of full-on sex. And guess what….
Luckily, daughter number two when she arrives is the opposite of Dede, but that’s in the future. Meanwhile, things settle down a little in the apartment. Elena’s mother has come to live with them by now, having forgiven the earlier snubs, and finally Elena seems to be ready to write again. Adele has kept reminding her that her readers are waiting for a new book, and a long and interesting conversation with Lila has made her think about their own past in a new way. For the first time in years, she and Lila had spoken as they used to, and it gives Elena a sense of connection with the Rione in all its complexity. She is convinced she has enough in her to write a novel about—and I’m partly guessing here, because we learn no details about it—why working people’s lives were so awful in the 1950s and 60s. She finishes it before the new baby is due, sends the top copy to Adele, and waits.
And waits. Pietro hears about it from Adele, and is annoyed that Elena hadn’t run any of it past him. When she leaves a copy on his desk, she finds it next day, unread, under other papers. Meanwhile, days pass with no contact. When the call eventually comes, the conversation is excruciating. Nothing Elena says can change the fact that her second novel is unpublishable. Suddenly, her own sense of herself is in doubt. She sends the third and final copy to Lila, ignoring her protests that she never reads now and will be no judge. That all-important, possibly life-changing conversation I’ve already mentioned comes many days later.
So where does all this leave Elena? The single thing that is going right is life with her new daughter. She attaches to the nipple immediately, smiles placidly, sleeps well… etc. All the rest can go to hell, Elena decides—or a not fully-conscious part of herself decides—as she sacks the nanny and throws herself into domestic life. She knows what Pietro wants from her. ‘I was his wife, … and he expected me to pay close attention when he spoke to me about politics, about his studies [etc.], but the attention had to be affectionate; he didn’t want opinions, especially if they caused doubts. … His mother was a completely different type of woman. And so was his sister. Evidently he didn’t want me to be like them.’ So that’s what she’ll be from now on, the ideal wife and the perfect mother.
(She ignores for the time being that she’s managed to alienate her own mother by resolutely not naming her daughter after her. True, it’s hard to imagine a more inappropriate name for the daughter of people like them than Immaculata, but Elena isn’t even tactful about it. The new daughter is Elsa, not even Elisa after Elena’s sister.)
Does she really believe herself? In her late twenties now, is she really so lacking in self-awareness that she can pretend her life since school—the study, the steady nurturing of her own intellectual capacities, the writing—was one long aberration, and that family life will be sufficient? I’m not sure it really matters because, inevitably, it doesn’t last. Pietro’s sister Mariarosa comes to Florence to do a presentation on a book written by one of her feminist friends, and the event galvanises Elena’s thinking. A robust comment by Mariarosa leads to some women in the audience to gather after the presentation, and form a consciousness-raising group. Elena suddenly feels as though scales have fallen from her eyes. Of course, everything she ever does, or has ever done, is to please the Patriarchy.
You can imagine Pietro’s sarcasm. Elena is now reading the books and pamphlets that Adele has been vainly pushing in her direction for years, and Pietro snorts at the weakness of these so-called feminists’ so-called arguments…. Everything is confirmed, again, for Elena. Here is another way in which her old life has been a sham. Something, surely, has got to change—but, in that impulsive way of hers, she overdoes it with Pietro: ‘“You think you’re so great but everything you are you owe to your father and mother, just like Mariarosa.” His reaction was completely unexpected: he slapped me, and in Dede’s presence.’ He leaves the house until the early hours, then tells her first that she’s never loved him, and then that he doesn’t deserver her. Something really has got to change.
Chapters 79-96
But… maybe Ferrante wants us to realise how slowly change happens during the course of a life. Elena has come to one of her occasional big realisations by the end of these chapters, but I’m not sure it will come to much. She’s just spent a dreadful time in Naples—we’re to believe, astonishingly, that she hasn’t paid a single visit in the years since her wedding—culminating in the most troubling conversation yet with Lila. She decides on the drive back to Florence that she’s finally got to the bottom of the problem: she’s got to make her own way, completely independent of Lila and her disapproval. We’ll see how that one goes…
…but meanwhile, Ferrante has a lot of other things going on. This the mid-1970s, and Italian politics are in a mess. The little world of this novel is a microcosm, as people that Elena and Lila grew up with become involved in the kinds of outrage which, as Ferrante presents things, are now almost commonplace. It’s as though characters have been assigned roles as archetypes, as we’ve already been seeing. The Solaras are the Mafia. Gino and his cronies are the fascists. Pasquale, with his building-worker’s body, is the proletariat who have had enough of Capital and, as we see when they drop in on Elena for a few hours, Nadia is his starry-eyed middle-class cheerleader.
And this is a novel, so Ferrante can bring it all close to home. The shooting dead of a fascist in Naples makes the national news—and reader, it’s Gino. He had been the first boyfriend of a very young Elena, but later morphed into the fascist bully-boy going after left-wing demonstrators. She wonders who might have shot him, thinks of Pasquale who, with Nadia, seems to have gone to ground. When Elena telephones la Galiana for any information she might have, her manner is ice-cold. Her errant daughter lives her own life…. It might be some time around now that Elena calls Lila after a break (there are a lot of breaks), and Lila is dismissive of her. What does she know about what goes on in the old place, now that she’s been gone so long?
Elena’s sense of having become an ignorant outsider disturbs her, and things come to a head when there’s another shooting in Naples. Bruno Soccara has been murdered by a man and two women, and on the way into the factory, the intruders had kneecapped the appalling gateman who once tried to make Lila have sex with him. It’s all dreadfully disorientating for Elena, and her growing sense of having lost her way shakes her to the core. It’s a long time since that conversation, that had seemed like a game-changer at the time, when she and Lila talked as they had in the old days. That hadn’t ended well, we remember—the novel she wrote based on what seemed like a new understanding of how things worked in the Rione had been a mess—and now she doubts everything about who she is any more.
There’s nobody to talk to, she sleeps badly, and in some an almost hallucinatory moment of pseudo-revelation, Lila becomes a mastermind of subversive activism. She was the instigator of the murder of Bruno Soccara, and Elena sees perfectly in her mind’s eye how she would have led the others—Pasquale and Nadia, in thrall to her superior strategic sense—through the familiar route to Bruno’s office. It’s a fantasy, obviously, despite Elena, or Ferrante, presenting it as though it were the truth. And why not? It’s as plausible a scenario as others we’ve come across and, surely, Lila would be capable of such cool manipulation. Except if we believe that, we haven’t been paying attention. Lila is clever, and angry, and can seem coldly manipulative… but she isn’t interested in causes. The truth of her recent life is very different from the violent glamour Elena imagines for her.
In fact, Lil’s working life in these years is far from that of the red-eyed revolutionary. We remember how Enzo had been given that leg-up into the computing world by a friend of Pietro’s, and how Lila had always been there to help. He had made progress at IBM, while Lila couldn’t help learning at his side as he came to grips both with the broader concepts and finer details. He had become the manager of a subsidiary unit, on a big salary—with Lila now at his side, apparently content to earn far less. But Ferrante has been playing a long game, and has kept Michele Solara’s obsession with her bubbling in the background. He invests in an information-processing centre of his own, and keeps offering Lila bigger and bigger inducements to manage it. She always refuses… until, it seems, she doesn’t. Her salary now is a shade higher than Enzo’s at IBM.
Elena, wrong-headedly taking the moral high ground, decides to speak to her about it. Oh, dear. Lila is almost gleefully sarcastic about the pronouncements of this privileged outsider. Now, more than ever, she taunts Elena about how little she knows. And Lila knows things that Elena doesn’t about her own family. First, Elena’s brothers are now employed by the Solaras. And second… is Lila right in thinking that Elena has no idea that her younger sister Elisa—the one who shares her name with Elena’s younger daughter—is now seeing Marcello Solara? It’s terribly undermining, as Lila wanted it to be, and it sets up a firework show of humiliations for Elena over the next few chapters.
Ferrante has set it up painstakingly. First comes the telephone call to her mother, Elena thinking she can take the role the aggrieved older sister—why did nobody think to as her what she thought?—which her mother immediately dismisses. Elena knows nothing because she’s too busy with her own lovely life. She knows nothing of how her brothers can now hold up their heads proudly in the Rione, how the family has more money coming in than it ever had before. And Elisa is better off than any of them. She’s treated like a queen now.
Elena—maybe this is the flaw that gives Ferrante licence to bring her down so mercilessly—doesn’t see how she’s brought this on herself. She will go to Naples and tell her siblings, and especially Elisa, that they have got to remember what kind of a family the Solaras are. Oh dear, again. Pietro drives the whole family there—Elena has to take over in the city, because she knows how to drive like a Neapolitan—and they book into a hotel. She’ll soon sort things out, she thinks.
Hah. First, she discovers that she can’t speak to Elisa at home because she is already living in Marcello’s big apartment. She’ll go there, then, ignoring her mother’s plea—it’s really a warning—that Elisa is preparing a surprise for her. And when she gets there, she realises she can do nothing. Elisa, now a beautiful and generous-hearted young woman, is blissfully happy as she is. Marcello couldn’t be more kind, her life couldn’t be more different from anything she had ever expected—she didn’t have the brain to climb out of the Rione in the way Elena did—and Elena can say nothing. She can’t possibly argue with Elisa—just look at how thrilled she is about meeting her nieces for the first time, and she has some lovely presents for them—so Elena gives up any idea of a big-sister talk. She would love to be able to simply leave…
…but Elisa has prepared a celebration, and everybody’s been invited. Elena is trapped, and Ferrante’s ambush of her flawed heroine has begun. People start to arrive, and it’s not too bad at first. True, her mother’s bursting pride at how far Elisa has come is a little galling, but Elena can bear it. The rest of the family arrive with Pietro, who looks uncomfortable as he tries to explain something to Elena in private. But her father makes Pietro sit next to him to watch TV—and Elena’s attention is on the big man she realises must be Marcello. It’s been a long time, and he is all charm and politeness about her successes. So far, so bearable… but it emerges they are not really there to celebrate Elena’s visit. It’s the birthday of the unspeakable loan shark Manuela Solara, the materfamilias.
Even that wouldn’t be so bad—she’s aged far beyond her years, and seems to suffer from dementia—but Ferrante hasn’t nearly finished. Who should arrive but Gigliola, unrecognisable as the tearful friend confessing the horrors of life with the philanderer Michele. Now she’s the archetypal mobster wife, all gold and breasts pushing out over her low-cut dress. When she talks admiringly to Pietro, she loves how he finds it hard to raise his eyes to her face. Michele is there by now, and he too speaks of his admiration for his old friend and her brilliant husband. Not that it stops him trying to humiliate Pietro with talk of how many women he’s had. Elena can see exactly what he’s doing, even if Pietro can’t—he’s happy to admit that for him, Elena is the one and only.
Enough? Don’t be ridiculous. Michele has invited Lila, apparently with the sole purpose of letting everybody in the room know that there’s only one truly great mind amongst them, and it isn’t Elena’s. How does it go? ‘You mustn’t be offended, Lenù, you’re smart, you’ve gone so far, you’ve been in the newspapers, you’re the pride of us all who have known you since you were a child. But—and I’m sure you agree, and you’ll be pleased if I say it now, because you love her—Lina has something alive in her mind that no one else has, something strong, that jumps here and there and nothing can stop it…’ and so on, and on. Lila might hate what he’s doing, but she doesn’t stop him—and seems to accept the unspoken view that Elena’s success was a one-off, and a long time ago now.
Is there anything at all to let poor Elena believe that she isn’t at rock bottom? Here’s the proud, successful older sister, not only reduced by the mobster to the status of a quaint has-been, but also forced to endure his brother’s hospitality. Pietro had tried to warn her that he couldn’t stop the Solaras from having their cases re-packed at the hotel—the thought appals Elena—and bringing them to Marcello’s apartment so they can stay there.
In fact, there is one thing lets Elena salvage a scrap of dignity from the sorry evening. On a trip to Germany, Elisa had met the ever-loyal Antonio. He had sent Elena a present that salvages some of her pride. All eyes on her as she unwraps—what could it be?—a German edition of her novel. Suddenly she’s a success again, Gigliola is almost beside herself with wonder at how such a thing can be possible, and all Lila can do is put on a big show of being unimpressed. Not that this stops Elena laying into Pietro in the guest room later. How could he let them be walked over in that way? But, really, she knows nobody could have stood up to Michele. He’s the one who put on what has been nothing but a show of his own power, their own smallness, and Lila’s subordination to him.
But it’s Lila’s disloyalty that rankles. In a conversation in the hall after Michele’s performance, Lila is as dismissive as ever—‘You don’t know anything about us anymore, so it’s better if you say nothing’—then decides it’s time for another bombshell. Guess who’s a professor in Naples now? And married to an industrial heiress, and has a daughter with her? ‘The news burned my chest,’ says Elena in this translation because, of course, it’s Nino. Nino who she hasn’t seen since the bookshop event at the start of the book six years before, Nino who she decided… well, we know what she decided then. ‘Nino had betrayed Lila and me.’ Yes. But also, ‘I realised that precisely because all women wanted him and he took them all, I who had wanted him forever wanted him even more.’ She decides that now they are in the same city again, he and Lila will find one another, and something extraordinary will happen: ‘she’ll make up her mind to divorce Stefano, and maybe she’ll marry Nino, maybe not, but certainly they’ll put their intelligences together and who can say what they will become.’
It’s now that Elena comes to her realisation about herself: ‘Become. It was a verb that had always obsessed me, but I realised it for the first time only in that situation. I wanted to become, even though I had never known what. And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition. I had wanted to become something—here was the point—only because I was afraid that Lila would become someone and I would stay behind. My becoming was a becoming in her wake. I had to start again to become, but for myself, as an adult, outside of her.’
In other words, after this latest game-changer—so many game-changers—she’s still banging on about Lila. She’s got to be independent of her, she tells herself—and we’ll see how she gets on with that.
Chapters 97-123—to the end
She doesn’t need to get on with it at all, because Lila absents herself for the entire duration. Except for one inopportune little call, just before Elena is about to leave Pietro and throw herself into an entirely new life. It’s not independence from Lila that’s the issue, it’s something—and someone—far more complicated. Ferrante must be playing a very long game indeed—how should I know?—because back into her life comes you-know-who. And this time, it seems that Nino means business. As in, it’s all or nothing for both of them, so choose. Now. And, it seems, Elena has chosen.
Before all that, Ferrante takes us through the tricky politics that people like Pietro have to navigate in Italy’s Years of Lead. He is about to fail a student with a father in the Party, and the student pulls a gun on him. Pietro reports him to the police, the student is arrested… and everybody except Pietro can see that life’s too short to try and stand on principle these days. The student’s family contact Pietro’s father, and Elena overhears Guido Airota trying to shout some sense into him. Elena herself joins in—and meanwhile the police put pressure on him to report any other leftist students he thinks might be a terrorist. Pietro gives in to none of them, and later tells Elena that he didn’t tell them about Pasquale and Nadia’s stay in their house before the killings.
I wonder, in Ferrante’s scheme, where Pietro fits. Super-principled, therefore admirable, or dangerously naïve? Nino, in a later conversation, laughs at the idea of Pasquale being any kind of terrorist, and assures her that Nadia is the best-hearted, most caring woman he’s ever met. But how far should we trust anything anybody says? Or anybody else lost in the pragmatic moral compromises of the times?
But the real storyline, covered in the most forensic detail Ferrante can muster, is the slow-motion detonation of the Elena/Nino affair. There are 24 chapters between the moment we find out Nino is coming for lunch, and the lovers’ departure to attend a five-day conference in France leaving their families behind. Ferrante maps the affair so closely, covering every conceivable shift in Elena’s state of mind, that it often feels shockingly vivid. We’ve come a long way from that burning chest of Elena’s when Lila mentioned his name.
Do I need to outline it, step by tortured step? Not really, because what Ferrante does is make details we’ve heard a thousand times seem viscerally real. It works for me—sometimes I was finding it hard to read on, especially when Nino forces her hand and she has to tell Pietro. His response is almost as gut-wrenching as Elena’s.
It starts slow. We know it’s going somewhere because Elena tells us the date when Dede announces that ‘a friend of Papa’s’ is coming to lunch. ‘I remember the date precisely: March 9, 1976.’ (This is the date when a dreadful cable-car crash took place in the Dolomites. I’m sure Ferrante hasn’t chosen it at random.) Lunch is served, and everything is as civilised as could be. Pietro is thrilled to have the famous radical in his house—but what’s really noticeable is how insistent Nino is from the start that Pietro is the lucky one to be married to such an exceptional talent as Elena. She tells him about what she has been writing recently—a free-form long essay she’s already sent to Mariarosa for publication in France—based on her new idea. She cites women authors, and the Bible itself, to show how Western thought is all predicated on the male view of reality. Women have always been forced to modify their own discourse in those terms—there is no female sociolect, only a version of the male. Nino asks her to let him have a copy.
Next come the polite, all-above-board telephone calls—she needs to send it to her usual publisher, he tells her—and then more secretive ones. Nino—is it at her request or Pietro’s?—will stay with them the next time he’s in Florence. Which is when the big lurch into something new begins to happen. Ferrante is almost as interested in Italian men’s ways of navigating their world as she is in women’s, and she shows us exactly how the streetwise, Rione-born Nino can run rings around the super-conventional Pietro, who has no idea of how banter works. And Nino’s is a highly-developed, sharply teasing style that Pietro doesn’t understand at all. But, in his step-by-methodical-step way, he knows he is being mocked. And he knows that somehow, Elena is letting it happen.
Is she sharing other secrets with Nino by now? She must be, because when things reach a head and it becomes clear Nino can’t stay any longer—he’s been there ten days—they are going to keep in contact by phone. And it escalates from there. Nino comes with that wife of his, rich but almost embarrassingly poorly educated. But Elena forces herself to go shopping with her, and makes a good impression. Later, on a visit without his wife, Nino meets Elena, they have hotel sex, they have sex in Elena and Pietro’s bed (or is that later?), and all the while she is narrating how it is affecting her. At first, all she can think about is how many years she’s been wasting, married to the wrong man. Then, at a non-rational, viscerally unquestionable level, she goes through the stages of a growing conviction that she must give everything up for this man.
And so on. At first, it is Elena who needs to convince Nino that they must leave their families. He seems caught off-balance, taking her through all the comforts and certainties of their lives—although the reader might wonder whether, in fact, he finds it unexpected at all. At first he reminds her how extraordinary Pietro is, how wonderful an asset it is to be a part of his family—but he gives up on that eventually, and tells her how he cares nothing for his wife. So, they wonder, are they going to do it? More than once, Elena decides. When they are on holiday, and she has taken a day off to see Nino in Florence—that’s when they have sex in the marital bed—she decides it must end, and for days she doesn’t call him on the public phone. And then she does.
It’s the secret telephone calls back in Florence that force the issue. Both of them have had to hang up hastily when the spouse has answered but, suddenly, Nino’s wife catches her by surprise. Whore, she calls her, and some far worse names—and Elena realises Nino must have told her about the affair. Which means… when Pietro asks her if she thinks he’s completely blind, and asks who the other man is—he mentions the one she had the not-quite affair with years before—it comes down to the truth. Yes, it’s Nino, yes, she’s always loved him—but she can’t bring herself to speak that last cruelty. No, they have never made love.
Her little fiction doesn’t last, of course. And now she has to navigate the horror of telling not only Pietro but also the daughters she loves that ‘Mummy and Daddy’ can no longer go on living together. Pietro’s response is perfect, and completely convincing, He forces her to make the agonising confession to the children that it is she who is leaving—she loves Nino more than she loves them. It doesn’t matter that we’ve witnessed scenes like this before. In Ferrante’s telling of it, we feel all of Elena’s pain, whilst entirely believing that by this time, she is absolutely sure has no choice in the matter.
She tells Pietro about the five-day conference, that she is going to go—but that she will definitely come back. Oh no you won’t, says Pietro. If she goes, she’s on her own and will never see the girls again. OK, she says—Ferrante is good at having Elena narrate her own cowardice truthfully—she won’t go. But she’s packed her bag, and on the agreed date she leaves the girls with neighbours and gets on the plane with Nino.
This is the final chapter. But in the chapter before, on the day before she leaves, Lila phones for the first time since she made Elena feel small in Naples over a year ago. Things are blowing up in Naples, almost literally. Manuela Solara has been killed, Michele is on the warpath and, it seems, a lot of his business enterprises are on hold. Including the one Lila works in—she isn’t currently working. But, since Elena is the only person she can trust—the unintended irony of the word cuts Elena—she’s sending Gennaro to stay for a while so that she can sort things out. It’ll be lovely for all the kids, won’t it? No, says Elena—and when Lila hears who she’s running off with she couldn’t be more astonished. ‘You’re joking,’ she says, then tries to tell her what she’ll losing. ‘It must have seemed impossible to her that I was inserting disorder into my house, my well-organized mind…’ and, worse, she thinks Nino is the worst possible news for any woman. The chapter ends—and there’s little more than ordinary details of the departure in the final one that follows—very ominously:
‘Nino? You’re ruining your family for him? You know what will happen to you? He’ll use you, he’ll suck your blood, he’ll take away your will to live and abandon you. Why did you study so much? What fucking use has it been for me to imagine that you would enjoy a wonderful life for me, too? I was wrong, you’re a fool.’
Bring on the final novel in the quartet. But not just now—I haven’t got over this one yet.
We can read it for you wholesale 