In the age of social media, which spurns on self-indulgence, Elena Ferrante's choice to be an outlier of social anonymity is refreshing. She once said to her editor that "I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors." This brings back some type of purity-false or not-to the eternal art of storytelling.
"My Brilliant Friend" is the first in her four-part Neapolitan series. It is a picture of a post WW-II, early modern Naples. LIke her contemporary Karl-Ove Knausgaard, her writings tread the murkiness of fiction and non-fiction. The major difference between the two is that unlike Knausgaard, Ferrante's own life is behind a thin veil of discretion.
In a sensory manner, the novel elicits a tactile presence along with many propensities of high emotion. There is a definite emphasis on how women are negatively shaped and limited by their social surroundings and expectations. There seems to be an intensity of purpose with her writings. Ferrante finds little if any redemption in the traditional female experience. It is a fatalism, a ring of fire, an unbroken circle.
This book marks the beginnings of the main characters Elena Greco and the undefinable Lila Cerullo. Lila, the daughter of a shoemaker, is the brilliant friend but also vindictive, confrontational, obsessively problem-solving and eventually, stunningly beautiful. Elena is continually under the influential guise of her friend. As Elena moves on to higher education, Lila resorts to quitting school and marrying young. The two end up being almost exact inverses of each other. For Elena, the question becomes a matter of whether she plagiarizes or honours Lila in her writings?
Ferrante is intimate and candid in her bildungsroman or coming of age story. Elena seems to go through the motions("I did many things in my life without conviction...I always felt slightly detached from my own actions"), while Lila has actions of both propensity and intensity. The Naples childhood in the 1950's "was full of violence....life was like that, that's all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us." When they were young children, Lila threw Elena's favourite doll down the dark cellar and Elena in return does the same to her. Later on, Lila describes Naples as a place without love, which in turn, makes the people sterile and promotes violence. In many ways this book is also a sociological photo of a time and place, through the eyes of both class and gender. Elena realizes by the end of "My Brilliant Friend" that by marrying young to a grocer, Lila kept "chained in a glaring way to that world, from which she imagined she had taken the best." Elena, on the other hand, managed to escape that world. In external appearance, she would no longer be a pleb.
Elena's feelings of inferiority and awe of Lila persist. All Elena can come up as a reason is some sort of shrouded theory. "I had the impression, from the way she used me, from the way she handled Stefano, that she was struggling to find, from inside the cage in which she was enclosed, a way of being, all her own, that was still obscure to her." Elena herself feels separated from her own words and actions and is still in pursuit of discovering her own true identity, while Lila looks to have been certain from day one.
****1/2
No comments:
Post a Comment