I realized that my reading had suffered due to the lack of air travel. Being suspended in composite cylinder mid-air, with the din of engines among strangers, uniquely motivates you to finish your reading.
So, the slow reader that I am, on a recent long flight, I finally tackled the second book of the Neapolitan quartet. Elena Ferrante’s The Story of a New Name is even more brilliant than the first book “My Brilliant Friend” which introduced Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo, growing up in the poverty of Naples. The Story of a New Name follows them through adolescence and youth as they try to escape their fates. They are fiercely intelligent, headstrong, and proud. Their friendship is chaotic and maddeningly symbiotic, with their schadenfreude constantly simmering underneath and occasionally bursting like burning magnesium.
I don’t quite feel that I can rise to describe the brilliance of the book. What could I say about Elena Ferrante that has not been said? An old joke goes: “Everything has been said. But has everyone said it?”. So here I go.
Function of Prose
Ferrante’s prose is stodgy and workmanlike. I was puzzled by her style while reading My Brilliant Friend. In the second book, the acuity of this choice emerges clearly. The descriptive phrasing (“two things happened today”) is sharp, precise, but unrelenting as a surgical scalpel. The characters are cadavers on a table — their innermost feelings and fears are laid bare as the knife studiously, skillfully tears the sinews, and gets deeper into the hidden heart.
Friendship and poverty are well-trodden paths for the Great Novel and particularly a bildungsroman work like this one. Therefore, it is natural to wonder what’s new here. Yet, I can’t shake off the feeling that no one has done what she is doing. I feel amazed as Keats felt on first seeing Chapman’s Homer. Again, despite the newness, the events in the book are so commonplace that every reader, I feel, will find something they can relate to in their lives. This brilliance of the novel is in being simultaneously personal and universal.
Ferrante’s prose, deceptively couched in mundane words, delivers us to the ugliest corners of our souls — the recesses of our hidden fears and untold apologies. It is insane. How could this be a work of fiction? The soul-crushing adjacency to the deepest thoughts feels so confessional. The factual ambiguity between the writer Elena Ferrante and writer Elena Greco in the novel only compounds the weight of the autobiographical narrative.
Love is violence
Some readers expressed surprise at the violence of the characters in their childhood and adolescence. Those who grew up in poverty know that for kids and young women all joys are momentary and the threat of violence looms omnipresent. Acts of violence are unpredictable and intermittent, but the threat of physical hurt is perpetual. Violent acts on women are ignored and forgotten in time, like their surnames erased in two generations.
Ferrante’s writing starkly reveals this asymmetry: “We had grown up thinking that a stranger must not even touch us, but our father, our boyfriend, our husband, could hit us when they like, out of love, to educate us, to reeducate us.” The display of violence often ostensibly arrives as love, and it always flows “down” — from fathers, brothers, teachers, boyfriends, and husbands. Indeed, the novel — and Lila’s supposed new life — begins with a profane act of violence and its repercussions propagate through all the lives that are connected to her.
In my native tongue, there is a saying often repeated to women: “The hand that hits you, also embraces you”. The received wisdom supposes that hugs make the slaps better, and they are the yin and yang of some cosmic balance. However, slaps and embraces are just two echelons of violence that women have come to accept. Eventually, the slaps are preferred, and the best they can expect (as Lila does) is to stop the violence at the beatings. The doors will rattle, cupboards will be broken and plates are thrown — but the sexual compulsion moves outdoors, out of sight, and out of the home.
The Past Never Escapes You.
“Seventeen years of shit”, the 17-year-old Lila summarizes her life wistfully in the middle. Elsewhere, Elena, daughter of a porter, failing to escape Naples notes that “I am what I am and I have to accept myself; I was born like this, in this city, with this dialect, without money; I will give what I can give, I will take what I can take, I will endure what has to be endured”.
Elena Ferrante switches to a character “talking in dialect” often. In fact, even in the Italian version of the novel, the characters speak in dialetto. Switching to the Neapolitan dialect happens when the characters express their innermost frustrations, resorting to crassness, either to insult or to defend themselves against inimical condescension. It is the ultimate aegis of the weak; powerless, shameful, and satisfying.
It is a brutal irony of history that Ferrante perhaps underlines by referring to her characters speaking the dialect but not writing the dialect itself. The Neapolitan dialect was a classical Romance language with its own history of poetry and literature, abandoned after Risorgimento, now showing up as an unwritten dialect in Ferrante’s novels, often signifying a limitation and a constraint. Like the Neapolitan characters, the Neapolitan dialect is also being throttled.1
This reminded me of one summer internship job, training to be an engineer, visiting production factories in North Madras. (Even now, I love to visit factories and have made it a point to visit factories in Japan, Mexico, the US, China, and Germany). I would stop by the shop floor and chat with workers to understand bottlenecks, product, and process design. Once I visited a subassembly section, where several workers were busy turning the lathe, amidst the exhaust of chips, burrs, and dust. There, a worker who I was talking to disappointedly chided me for using the dialect to refer to dust. “I sweat hard in the factory so that young men like you can do better”, he said and then asked me to stop using words like dust in dialect.
Now many years later, reading an acclaimed foreign translation in the language of the elites, I could hear the dialect, the sounds, and the stillness of that tropic afternoon. Ferrante asks the universal question, that those beholden to the past often ask, “Had I made it? Almost. Had I torn away from Naples, the neighborhood? Almost. Have I made new friends […]? Almost.”
Ferrante’s brilliance distills this dilemma of outcomes caused by the cold randomness of life. Those who escape because of fortune and happenstance, only barely escape. Some brilliant ones, the luckless, end up like Blue Fairy, the book Lina wrote as a child prodigy, kindling the fire in a meatpacking factory.
Notes:
1. I have argued in my essays here that English developed as a global language from its humble origins because it was flexible enough to absorb words regardless of their origins, probably because of the aspirational nature of the English working-class ruled by the French-speaking nobles.