I devoured this in a day- a rainy, cold, February Sunday. Even though I had an inkling of the ending because of the publicity around the film, which II devoured this in a day- a rainy, cold, February Sunday. Even though I had an inkling of the ending because of the publicity around the film, which I have not not yet seen, I was still mesmerized. Bravo to Robert Harris for clean prose, a tight plot, and precisely-drawn characters. He let the story tell itself, and the reader to form her own opinions, without belaboring the narrative with too much backstory or thematic inquiry. ...more
The novel opens in obvious crisis: Teddy Carlyle returns to her Rome apartment, covered in blood. Close on her heels are two embassy officials seekingThe novel opens in obvious crisis: Teddy Carlyle returns to her Rome apartment, covered in blood. Close on her heels are two embassy officials seeking answers. The 300 pages that follow wind back in time to show us how everything went so terribly wrong.
Teddy Carlyle is a zaftig Texas socialite who is rapidly aging out of relevance by the time she marries a minor State Department suit and accompanies him to his posting in Rome. It's 1969, but Teddy missed the memo. She's still pouring her luscious flesh into girdles and pantyhose and teasing her hair into architectural wonders, batting her false eyelashes, while the enlightened women around her are wearing their hair long and loose, letting mini-skirt graze the tops of their bare thighs, and charting their own courses. But Teddy is more than the sum of her superficial parts. She is a woman of secrets and lies, and they are about to catch up with her.
Teddy is a highly-stylized noir caper that features breathtaking period detail overlaid on eye-rollingly unlikely circumstances. There is something off about Teddy—a whiff of soured milk—underneath the heavy French perfume. It's not just that she's an unreliable narrator, it's that her very essence is a curdled mess. I found her deeply sad, but the artifice of her life is so unbelievable that I couldn't muster much sympathy. The novel is cleverly plotted, in the spirit of Taylor Jenkins Reid, but TJR imbues a warmth and depth in her characters, where here the blood is tepid.
Emily Dunlay is a sharply talented writer. Despite its glittering attributes, Teddy left me dispirited....more
I didn't love this collection of stories set in contemporary Rome. Until, quite suddenly, I did. As a collection, it is melancholy and cool, like the I didn't love this collection of stories set in contemporary Rome. Until, quite suddenly, I did. As a collection, it is melancholy and cool, like the end of a wet day in autumn. There is a remoteness to the characters that renders their stories in sharp-edged black and white, with all the soft nuances of gray in-between. Elegant. Nearly noir.
As a fan of Jhumpa Lahiri since her first collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, knocked my socks clean off (and won the Pulitzer Prize) twenty-five years ago, I have followed her writing career and knew she began studying Italian with single-minded intensity in the mid-2000s, eventually moving to Italy. She now lives between New York, where she directs the creative writing program at Barnard College, and Rome. These stories, like all her work since 2015, were first written in Italian and translated, mostly by Lahiri herself.
Nearly all feature an outsider's perspective. Although we can intuit the narrator or protagonist to be an immigrant fleeing poverty or political strife, or in a few cases, an American chasing language or love, no place other than Rome is named. Other origin or destination locations are left ambiguous, as if Lahiri were leaning heavily into the proverb, All roads lead to Rome. In this collection, they most certainly do.
It was the initial detachment of voice that put me off, particularly in the two opening stories, The Boundary—so haunting and sad— and The Reentry, which features a creepy little girl and two old friends who are awkwardly referred to as "the woman in mourning" and "the professor." But I fell for the depths of P's Parties and its tender exploration of marriage and the accidental longing for another, and The Steps, which is like a stage play, featuring six characters who share a glimpse of their lives via the same flight of 126 stone steps they traverse regularly.
There is a longing to belong to Rome, to be of it, to be at peace once one surrenders to it, that must mirror the author's own relationship with her adopted city. Lahiri, who has so often explored the theme of being an outsider in her works that feature South Asian immigrants living in the United States, offers a series of stylized portraits that unfold in this ancient, storied city, a city that will endure long after we all have moved on to our own next chapters.
Sweet and tender, full of outrageously privileged and silly people living dreamy lives. A light but captivating read that will see you through the intSweet and tender, full of outrageously privileged and silly people living dreamy lives. A light but captivating read that will see you through the interminable air travel delays and insufferable flight, should you decide you simply have to be on a plane during these nightmarish days of sort-of-post Covid travel. Not that's this is where I read One Italian Summer: mine was an armchair journey on a summer's afternoon with a glass of ice cold Campari and soda. A frothy delight of a book, easily consumed while you're waiting to arrive somewhere else. ...more
Marry the gothic terror of Jane Eyre, the courtly intrigue of Wolf Hall and the sylvan setting of a Grimm fable and you have the ingredients for a delMarry the gothic terror of Jane Eyre, the courtly intrigue of Wolf Hall and the sylvan setting of a Grimm fable and you have the ingredients for a deliciously satisfying novel. But what gives The Marriage Portrait a flavor all its own is the luminosity of Maggie O'Farrell's prose. This is a novel ripe with mood and tension, humanity and heart. We learn the ending in the story's opening pages, and yet we are helpless to do anything but read on, hoping that we will find enough clues to change the inevitable outcome.
Wearied by contemporary life, I find myself craving historical fiction and fantasy. Maggie O'Farrell brought me one of my favorite books of the pandemic period: Hamnet, set in Elizabethan England, an imagining of William Shakespeare's wife, Agnes/Anne. With The Marriage Portrait set in Italy in the waning years of the Renaissance, she's done it again. Taking me away from the present by bringing me something new from the past: the life of a minor figure in the historical record, fleshed out and made wholly her own.
Lucrezia, the fifth child of the Grand Duke of Florence, a Medici no less, was a real person whose life ended early in circumstances that remain unknown. The Marriage Portrait recreates her with gorgeous precision, infusing each page with details of a life in a wealthy Renaissance family—which for a young woman is a prison lined with velvet bars. In an excruciating scene, her father adds a Bengal tiger to his basement zoo and Lucrezia awakens to her father's cruel power. He is a collector, of beasts, of children, of political favors. The description of this magnificent cat and Lucrezia's captivation by and empathy for the tigress are emblematic of the way this book can break your heart and steal your breath, over and over.
Lucrezia experiences her city of Florence only from windows and balconies of her family's expansive palazzo until she is married, not yet sixteen, and her husband, the Duke of Ferrera, takes her to his hunting lodge in Apennine Mountains of Emilia-Romagna. The warrior-duke is handsome, charming, and surprisingly gentle with his child-bride; we can almost believe that Lucrezia will be allowed to soar instead of being trapped in a gilded cage. She is a prodigiously gifted artist and the same qualities that kept her forever on the wrong foot with her family—a keen and curious intelligence and a rebellious spirit—would seem to serve her well as the female half of a powerful couple. But something is terribly off in the House of Ferrera and soon Lucrezia is fighting for her life.
This is a magnificent story of creativity and captivity set against in a fairytale of dark and foreboding luxury, with all-too-real consequences for women without agency. And yet, just as Lucrezia overpaints her own work to hide her true story, Maggie O'Farrell carefully strips away the story's tragic layers to reveal hidden depths of hope and resilience....more
This elegant and lapidary collection of essays on the art and conundrum of literary translation spoke to me on so many levels. As a writer, I felt JhuThis elegant and lapidary collection of essays on the art and conundrum of literary translation spoke to me on so many levels. As a writer, I felt Jhumpa Lahiri's thoughts on process, theme and reason like connective tissue between the hand and heart muscles:
Writing is a way to salvage life, to give it form and meaning. It exposes what we have hidden, unearths what we have neglected, misremembered, denied. It is a method of capturing, of pinning down, but it is also a form of truth, of liberation.
As a scholar of French language and literature, I nearly wept in recognition of Lahiri's struggles and triumphs as she learned to express her essence in a newly-learned and beloved language:
Confronting a foreign language as an adult is considerable challenge. And yet, the many doors I've had to open in Italian have flung wide, opening onto a sweeping, splendid view. The Italian language did not simply change my life; it gave me a second life, an extra life.
This has been so true for me, as well: careers, travel, relationships- all the doors opened to me because of a degree and facility in French.
But this slim collection of essays is focused on a very specific aspect of linguistic exploration: the misunderstood and undervalued craft of translation. What enriches these essays is Lahiri's perspective as a translator that is informed by her own writing. She explores the difference between inhabiting a narrative as the author and the consuming de-and reconstruction of the words and meaning as a translator.
Three of the essays focus on more technical aspects of translation relating to the Domenico Starnone novels Lahiri has translated — they are the novels' introductions and are reprinted here. The other pieces are more intimate reflections on Lahiri's own work or serve as explorations into the meaning of translation.
What I still wonder, which Jhumpa Lahiri ventures toward but never arrives at, is Why Italian, specifically. Her answer is a universal appreciation of doors opened by learning other languages, but she never addresses with any specificity her attraction to Italy or the Italian language.
I can, however, at least as it relates to my own experiences.
I had been in France for several months, attending a university in the foothills of the Alps, struggling mightily to discover who I was in this language and to convey the essence of myself. It was humbling, frustrating, an experience perhaps wasted on a 21-year-old. Later experiences living in France and studying the language revealed a more mature, confident speaker who wasn't humiliated by her stumbles. At any rate, I was also taking an Italian 101 class, learning Italian in French. It was my best class; it not only helped my French skills and my confidence, it brought me to Italy. And there, using my halting Italian, I found delight and acceptance that I was missing at the university in France, despite having years more study under my belt and a facility in speaking and comprehension in French that I of course did not have in Italian. Thus began my love affair with Italy and my desire to continue studying Italian.
I reconnected with that desire a few months ago, an out-of-the-blue realization that I put on a high shelf until I picked up this collection. Reading Lahiri, inspired by her passion for the language and her dedication to its study, I'm dusting off that shelved desire and trying to find the space in my life to carve out where I could fit in an Italian class.
A lovely exploration of what it means to be a writer, a reader, and to giving one's self up to another language, culture and way of seeing and interpreting the world....more
I will confess that I nearly abandoned Palace of the Drowned about 100 pages in. I wanted a snappier, less waterlogged read. But something - perhaps aI will confess that I nearly abandoned Palace of the Drowned about 100 pages in. I wanted a snappier, less waterlogged read. But something - perhaps a combination of stubbornness at not wanting to have wasted the time and the remembered pleasure of the author's debut, Tangerine (although now having reread my review, my recalled enjoyment is greater than what I felt in the moment) - compelled me to push through.
I'm glad I kept on. Mangan offers up another stylized psychological thriller that again owes its inspiration to the prolific pens preceding it: the mannered mid-20 century European backdrops of Patricia Highsmith, the droopy noir of Raymond Chandler, and the angst-ridden feminists of Virginia Woolf. Like Tangerine, this novel features another unsuspecting, emotionally vulnerable woman navigating an unfamiliar, exotic place and falling victim to a scheming beauty. It relies on coincidences and demands considerable suspension of disbelief that in less-skilled hands would result in book being thrown (figuratively, because I have too much respect for books) at the wall.
But damn, Mangan is such a great writer. She conjures up mood, time and place in captivating prose and adds in just the right amount of tension and certain doom to keep the pages turning. Frances"Frankie" Croy, a writer of dwindling success fast becoming a lush after a scandal forced her to flee London for the anonymity of Venice in winter, falls under the spell of Gilly, her professed "biggest fan". They meet by supposed chance on one of Venice's mazelike streets and soon Gilly is inserting herself into Frankie's lonely life, with unsurprisingly disastrous consequences. Just when you think Frankie is pulling herself together, writing again, finding grace in her solitude, she is fleeing yet another city, the hounds of guilt baying at her shoulder.
That's enough of the plot. Curl up to this literary noir with an ice-cold Negroni, bring your umbrella, and leave a light on....more
Novel doesn't feel like the correct descriptor for this slim and delicate self-portrait of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Fictional MemoNovel doesn't feel like the correct descriptor for this slim and delicate self-portrait of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Fictional Memoir or Dramatized Journal, perhaps. But whereas the plot is slender, the story is as fat and ripe and juicy as a late summer Italian plum.
An unnamed narrator in an unnamed Italian city recounts a year in her life through a series of short, simple, quiet vignettes, each stamped by a "whereabout" in her life: In the Hotel; By the Sea; In My Head, At the Coffee Bar, etc. She is a university professor in her mid-forties, single, never married, mourning her father who died when she was fifteen, and feeling vaguely guilty about her aging mother, who also lives alone in another city. She's an understated introvert in an ebullient culture that values large groups of friends and family members, that prizes abundance in its art, music and food. She carefully segments her time to fill the spaces in her life: the hours at work, meals in local trattoria, twice-weekly swims, reading before bed, the weekend's empty hours when she can hide under the covers all day if she chooses.
The vagueness of the narrator and her location and the abstract way she views her life unmoors the reader and leaves her feeling adrift. Yet, I cannot think of a more elegant and stirring representation of this past year and a half of isolation and sadness and anxiety than this lovely book. It's astonishing that Lahiri published her novel in its original Italian in 2015 — years before the pandemic and its lockdowns and forced distancing — presenting her own translation this year. The narrator embodies our pandemic sense of loss, giving voice to how it feels to wander through one's own life like a ghost. The pared down style is incredibly refreshing; for this introvert it's like entering a conversation without all the small talk bullshit that is my personal nails down a chalkboard. Like a poem, every word has weight and meaning here; it forces you to stop and listen, to reflect deeply.
I can't get over how such a slender work can contain such multitudes. I read Whereabouts in an evening and through an hour's stretch of insomnia later that night. I was prepared not to enjoy this; I wasn't prepared to be so sad to see it end.
I think my review may be longer than the actual book. That tells you something. I loved it....more
This is the second Sarah Winman novel that has left me weeping as I turned the final pages. It is everything, and it is exquisite.
Art historian EvelyThis is the second Sarah Winman novel that has left me weeping as I turned the final pages. It is everything, and it is exquisite.
Art historian Evelyn Skinner, a London blue blood of a certain age, and solider Ulysses Temper, a Cockney East Ender barely in his twenties, meet in Florence, Italy in 1944. Their encounter is brief but singular: they are sheltered together in a wine cellar during a bombing raid and discover several priceless works of Italian art hidden with them. The discovery is a bond that carries them from the end of World War II through the end of the 1970's, the scope of this epic, gorgeous book.
Ulysses returns to London after the war's end, to a broken city and a wife who has fallen in love with an American soldier. Peg, irresistibly beautiful, maddeningly irreverent, adores Temps, as he is known to his friends, but never intended to marry him; their union was the result of a night of gin and Temps's certainty he wouldn't make it through the war alive- his military benefits had to go to someone. They divorce, but the American soldier abandons Peg anyway, leaving her pregnant and forever jaded.
For a few years, Temps settles into life in the East End and we fall in love with his motley crew of friends: the owner of the shabby The Stoat and Parot pub, Col, forever in gastric distress and working his way through an alphabet of women, old man Cressy, a shorts-wearing savant who communes with a Japanese cherry tree planted incongruously on the shores of the Thames, Pete, a gangly piano player with dreams of stardom, and Claude, the giant blue parrot who lords over Col's pub, along with a raggedy stuffed stoat (hence its name). Then there is Alys, Peg's daughter who resembles, heartbreakingly, the American soldier Peg longs for.
This time spent in London, post-war through the early 60s, is difficult to describe. It's very sober quotidianess — a city and its people rebuilding themselves — is the vehicle for revealing the heart and spirit of Winman's characters. The pages flow easily from one tender or hilarious conversation and caper to the next as Winman cements the bond of this makeshift family, showing their enduring commitment to each other. Temps has taken over his father's globe-making business, an unusual trade, but one which Temps is uniquely suited to master. His particular skill in painstakingly mapping out and connecting worlds, his compassion for lost souls, and his longing for places not yet seen render his created Earths true works of art.
Then suddenly, their rain-and-rubble life in London is upended: Temps has inherited a set of apartments in central Florence, bequeathed by a Florentine whose life he'd saved all those years before. Temps takes this chance and moves with Cressy and Alys, who is better off with her adopted dad than her unstable mother, to Italy. And the sun breaks out, casting a golden radiance over the story that is about everything that matters: love, family, art, sex, and finding a purpose in life.
Eventually, everyone in the East End makes their way to Florence, frequently or forever, and despite the inevitable hiccups of life — we witness the 1966 Arno river flood that devastated Florence, Alys's teenage humiliation as she attempts love, and her mother's tragic resignation to a loveless marriage — this collection of family and friends centers their lives around each other and their joyous pursuit of pleasure, La Dolce Vita, indeed. The story circles back to Evelyn Skinner, who has hovered slightly offstage but is never gone, until it is she who becomes its central star.
How to convey writing that is so suffused with warmth and wit, color and energy? Themes that are enormous in their strokes and yet intimate in detail? Landscapes that belong to a particular moment yet are timeless in their effect? Still Life is anything but still - it dances and sings, weeps and trills with delight. This is as lovely a novel as I can hope to read, one that offers both hope and longing during a time when they seem too dear to hold onto.
Surely one of my top reads of the year. Brilliant....more
Stunning travelogue and recipe collection of this most majestic region of Europe. I lived in France's Savoie region, and hiking in Italy's Alto Adige Stunning travelogue and recipe collection of this most majestic region of Europe. I lived in France's Savoie region, and hiking in Italy's Alto Adige has long been in my top-5 travel dreams; I love the wines of these regions. The Alpine cuisine is a generally too heavy and dairy-laden for my system, but in small doses it's omg. But I enjoyed this massive tome less for the recipes and more for the stories of this gasp-worthy mountaintop, storybook part of the world that I so dearly love- Alpine Europe. ...more
To know me is to know that I am fascinated by the history of Europe in the Middle Ages, I love long-distance walking, I have written a novel about theTo know me is to know that I am fascinated by the history of Europe in the Middle Ages, I love long-distance walking, I have written a novel about the Catholic Church's crusade to rid France of the Cathars, and my bucket list is full of pilgrimages, even though I'm not, nor will ever be, Catholic.
So I couldn't wait to curl up with Timothy Egan's A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith, not only because of its setting and subject matter, but the author himself. A personal hero, one my Pacific Northwest compatriots, whose narrative nonfiction ranks among my favorites.
The author takes on the 1,200 mile Via Francigena, a medieval route between Canterbury and Rome, to contemplate the Catholic faith, search for meaning in its history, and come to terms with his own ambivalence. Egan was raised in a large Irish Catholic family in Spokane, home to the Jesuit university, Gonzaga. His mother was a vibrant, selfless, would-be artist who traded her own ambitions to raise a family and be a wife-mother to a taciturn salesman. He is a self-professed skeptic and abandoned his faith in the face of the Catholic church's and God's many failings, “You can see why people shun a supposedly benevolent creator who presided over the slaughter of the Wars of Religion, the African slave trade, the butchery of the Great War, Stalin’s mass executions, genocide in Germany and Uganda and Cambodia.” But Egan is hoping to reconnect with some manner of spirituality. His sister-in-law is dying of cancer, and he's getting to the age when one's mortality begs the question of an afterlife.
A Pilgrimage to Eternity is a humane, funny, gentle and engaging travelogue, a glimpse into the fraught and fascinating history of Catholicism and Christianity which is in many ways the history of Western Europe. Egan pulls no punches when detailing the broken promises and travesties of the Church, either historical or contemporary, including a harrowing episode of a predatory priest in Spokane, but he remains unabashedly admiring of Pope Francis and eagerly hopes for an audience with the pontiff at the end of his journey, using his connections as a journalist to reach out to the Vatican.
It's not clear what inner demons he calmed during his long walk to the seat of the Catholic Church; this books is less about Egan's spiritual journey than his physical and cultural one. It made me long to lace up my boots and strap on my pack, recalling the mind-emptying meditative bliss of my own long foot journeys through Ireland, and the peace I found in walking. I now add the Via Francigena to the long list of pilgrimages throughout Europe I will take in the years to come. Glad to learn the trick about taping heels (and toes- oh, that was so painful to read!).
A lovely travel narrative by one of my favorite non-fiction writers and journalists....more
This was an unexpected delight, a frothy confection that melts in the mouth to reveal a rich, satisfying core. Set in Siena in 1956, The Italian PartyThis was an unexpected delight, a frothy confection that melts in the mouth to reveal a rich, satisfying core. Set in Siena in 1956, The Italian Party is a stylized, playful comedy of manners fronting as a spy thriller. It is a celebration of Italy shaking off the dust and rubble of World War II and emerging with a Vespa-revving, Sophia Loren-curving new lease on life. Yet, beneath the optimism is a dark core of poverty and politics, corruption and betrayals that can't be so easily erased.
Newlyweds Scottie and Michael arrive in Siena in a shiny new Ford convertible, which proves too wide to fit through Siena's medieval streets. Michael, whose parents emigrated from Sicily to Americaa generation before, is in town to establish a new tractor dealership. At least that's his cover. Scottie is blissfully happy, glowing with the secret of a just-discovered pregnancy. At least, that's her cover. What ensues is a tapestry of lies that gets more tangled as Scottie and Michael tumble from one caper to another.
Suspension of disbelief is necessary to sink fully into the odd and sweetly-silly narrative. But there is also a poignancy and intelligence that elevates The Italian Party from mere rom-com. Christina Lynch deftly inserts national and sexual identity, feminism, and the grief of war into the hijinks of clumsy espionage and Prosecco-soaked parties at fashionably decrepit villas. Happily recommended!...more
I realize that the wish to write in a new language derives from a kind of desperation. I feel tormented, just like Verga’s songbird. Like her, I wish I realize that the wish to write in a new language derives from a kind of desperation. I feel tormented, just like Verga’s songbird. Like her, I wish for something else — something that I probably shouldn’t wish for. But I think that the need to write always comes from desperation, along with hope. Jhumpa Lahiri
Twenty-one summers ago I was finishing up one graduate degree in International Affairs and preparing to start a second one in Linguistics, moving from an inquiry into the effects women's levels of education in the developing world had on household income, birth rates and infant mortality, into an examination of how language affects our creativity. I intended to pursue a Ph.D in Linguistics and was mulling over a dissertation on expatriate writers in France who wrote in their adopted language. I planned to explore how writing in French had changed their approach the language of their stories, how this second, or some cases, third or fourth language, influenced the content and rhythm and expression of their thoughts.
Then I was offered a job, a great job, in my first field. I pondered the inherent financial and professional insecurities of a life in academe and I turned from the Ph.D path, away from Linguistics.
Oh, the irony as twenty years later I try to make a living as a writer, having turned from the path of financial and professional security and stability because it wasn't a life authentic to me. If someday I achieve a measure of commercial success, I will relocate lock, stock and barrel to France, where I can immerse wholesale into a language and culture that fills and sustains my heart and intellect.
Along comes Jhumpa Lahiri with In Other Words, a luminous meditation on how immersion in another language changes a writer's soul. In this evocative and earnest collection of brief essays on learning to express herself in Italian, Lahiri touches on everything I felt to be true or what I have experienced with equal intensity living in France and living in the French language: the daily intoxication and despair, the loss and discovery of self, the intimacy and estrangement that come with linguistic and cultural displacement.
This is not a book on what it's like to live in Italy. It is not a travelogue, a glimpse into a place any of us fortunate enough to have traveled there or who dream of going can mine for memories or tips. It could be set in Poland or Peru. This is a memoir of the mind of a writer who finds herself humbled by language. Lahiri writes of her first experiences crafting a story in Italian, “I’ve never tried to do anything this demanding as a writer. I find that my project is so arduous that it seems sadistic. I have to start again from the beginning, as if I had never written anything in my life. But, to be precise, I am not at the starting point: rather, I’m in another dimension, where I have no references, no armor. Where I’ve never felt so stupid.”
I am reminded as I savor these hesitant, glorious essays that my instincts two decades ago were right. Even then, so many years before I began writing, I understood the metamorphic potential that profound engagement with another language held for a writer. In Other Words has given me reason to take up that dream again, this time not at a scholarly remove, examining other writers' lives and work, but as a way to enhance my own. ...more
This is the end Beautiful friend This is the end My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end Of everything that stands, the end No safe
This is the end Beautiful friend This is the end My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end Of everything that stands, the end No safety or surprise, the end I'll never look into your eyes...again
Can you picture what will be So limitless and free Desperately in need...of some...stranger's hand In a...desperate land
Lost in a Roman...wilderness of pain And all the children are insane All the children are insane Waiting for the summer rain, yeah
~The Doors, "The End"
Nothing about the way the Neapolitan Novels has captured and held me spellbound makes sense. Pages of expository text barely broken by a paragraph indent; characters relentlessly bashing their heads against poverty and violence, returning again and again to the places and people that have caused them the greatest misery; periods of hope and redemption brought to bitter ends by poor choices and slashing domestic acrimony. And yet. And yet. I know that by reading Elena Ferrante's bildungsroman, I have partaken in one of the greatest literary journeys, feasts, dreams, accomplishments of the 21st century. It isn't so much that the Neapolitan Novels, built on the simple premise of a female friendship from childhood to old age, breaks new ground. It's that Ferrante returns us to the best of what we can be as readers: thoughtful, patient, introspective, willing to dig deep into layers of meaning, to see beyond the cold surface of quotidian events to the simmering magma of emotion beneath. In eras past, Eliot, Mann, Tolstoy, Woolf, Hardy demanded the same and the rewards of Ferrante are as great.
This final installment brings Elena Greco full circle, back to the neighborhood she fled as a young woman—first to the towers of academe, then to literary acclaim, spending her young adulthood and her early years as a wife and mother in the orderly, civilized north of Italy. But as her friend Lila had done years before, Elena throws propriety and security to the winds and follows her passion back to Naples, the scene of so much crime in the streets, so many crimes of the heart. That passion is the fickle Nino, the man-boy to whom both women sacrifice their burgeoning self-determination. I'm just full of lyrics today—as I think of Nino, of young Lila's and not-so-young Elena's obsession with his empty soul, I hear Paul Simon lamenting: "I have squandered my resistance for a pocketful of mumbles, such are promises All lies and jest, still a man hears what he wants to hear And disregards the rest, hmmmm".
We know from the very beginning—hundreds of pages ago, when we embarked on this political and personal Odyssey—that Lila has disappeared as an elderly woman, at the twisted and burnt end of her rope. But where has she gone? The legacy she leaves behind is that molten lava roiling beneath the surface, and in The Story of the Lost Child, the hard, black earth is rent open, letting the impossible heat burst forth. Elena seems more curious than concerned by Lila's disappearance. Her friend's presence hovers, thick and insistent, over every aspect of her life; Lost Child illustrates how and why this friendship has endured despite the psychological damage each woman inflicts on the other.
The title, The Story of the Lost Child, can be taken for its literal meaning, as the plot bursts with tension and tragedy. But the entire collection speaks to children lost in this Neapolitan ghetto, the children we met pages and heartbreaks ago. We witnessed their twisted paths to adulthood over the course of four novels, until at last we npw stand with them at a reckoning place. The great loss is the reader's, knowing we must bid our final goodbyes to the Grecos, Cerullos, Carraccis, Pelusos, Sarratores and so many others, with so much left unsaid and unknown.
And undone. Oh, how our hearts are utterly undone. ...more
”Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.” ~Lila Cerullo
Mount Vesuvius simmers on the edges of Naples, a dragon in slumber, a metaphor for the rum”Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.” ~Lila Cerullo
Mount Vesuvius simmers on the edges of Naples, a dragon in slumber, a metaphor for the rumbling, teeming city that erupts in violence without warning. The view of the volcano's hulking presence, seen through the windows of an upscale apartment, serves as proof that one has risen above the squalor of “the neighborhood” to arrive in the loftier heights. But no amount of money or education can sand away the rough resentments of those raised to fight for every scrap of power.
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the third installment of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels quartet, strikes me as the most intimate of the books. For it is here that Elena Greco turns from her past, staying away Naples for years at a time, closing the door on the embarrassment of her family and the simmering envy of her best friend, Lila Cerullo. We see more of Elena’s internal life than we’ve seen in the previous books as we follow her into marriage and motherhood. Elena Ferrante has admitted that much of her Neapolitan Novels is autobiographical and in Elena Greco we realize the irony of a young writer surrounded by profound social change, struggling to absorb and understand it, aching to write about it, yet confounded by her sexual awakening and domestic demands. She has defied the preordained path of marriage, children, poverty and drudgery by leaving Naples, completing university and becoming a celebrated author, yet now finds herself in exactly the place she was certain she’d escaped: the nursery, the kitchen, losing her singularity in the demands of husband and babies.
This novel is also the most political of Ferrante’s extraordinary bildungsroman. Opening against the backdrop of the 1968 student uprisings in Paris, and carrying into the 1970s Vietnam War protest movement, the clashes in Italy between the communists and neo-fascists, Baader-Meinhof and the rise of the Red Brigade, feminism and the sexual revolution, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay shows the social awakening of a nation through the intelligent but naïve eyes of Elena.
“The Personal is Political,” a phrase coined by feminist Carol Hanisch in 1970, is brought to narrative life by Ferrante’s women. Elena's first novel is selling well and she is infused with a sense of her own relevance. Yet, just as she finds her voice and her star rises, she marries Pietro Airota, the son of her literary champion Adele, and settles in Florence. Pietro, a seemingly liberal and enlightened university professor, balks when Elena expresses her desire not to have children right away; she is a writer and needs the time to continue learning and exploring her craft. But the Pill is not yet legal and Pietro has married her with far different expectations. The birth of two daughters in the first years of her marriage stultifies Elena’s creative intentions and her literary star dims and fades out.
Miles and lifetimes away, where we left her at the end of The Story With A New Name, Lila has become as physically frail as a branch stripped bare. She lives a platonic life with Enzo, after first fleeing her marriage to abusive Stefano and then her lover, the enigmatic Nino, raising her son and grinding through her days at a sausage factory. While Elena, consumed by motherhood, barely glances at the daily newspaper headlines, Lila is at the frontlines of the labor movement, agitating workers by standing up to the abuse and advances of her employer.
This is a novel of fierce and brutal love, of rivalry in marriage, in friendship, in national pride. But at its heart, the Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is the story of friendship, of the violence we do to those we love the most. Elena and Lila collide and spin away, only to orbit again into each other’s hearts. A phone call after months or years apart picks up their emotional conversation where it last left off, mercurial Lila prodding Elena to become the scholar, the writer, the figure of cultural significance Lila wants her to be, who Lila herself aches to be. They live in the shadows of their shared expectations, trying to push the other into the light. Lila is the novel’s conscience, Elena its irony; together they form the story of social awakening and exploration.
The women and men of these Neapolitan clans are so wholly under my skin, I feel with each page I’m mining my own family’s history. Ferrante writes with such urgency, such angry clarity, that my own psychology is flushed and agitated.
"Too many bad things, and some terrible, had happened over the years, and to regain our old intimacy we would have to speak our secret thoughts, but I didn't have the strength to find the words…," says Elena at the start of Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, looking back on sixty years of friendship. Yet those secret thoughts are offered to the reader in an intimate, vulnerable and enraged portrait of feminine friendship, with Ferrante's beautiful, powerful language. These books are astonishing. I’m already gutted that Book Four, its U.S. release imminent, is the last.
It is the early-mid 1960s and Naples is experiencing an economic and cultural renaissance: the post-war boom has created a new consumer class, with faIt is the early-mid 1960s and Naples is experiencing an economic and cultural renaissance: the post-war boom has created a new consumer class, with fancy shoe boutiques staffed by pretty girls dressed up like Jackie O. In university halls, students speak of the two Germanys, Indochina, nuclear arms, and Communism.
But not everything has changed. In the darker neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city, where violence is an accepted means of communication and a woman’s worth is tallied by first her father, then her husband, tradition vies with progress.
It is here we left Lila on her wedding day, at the end of Book One of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, My Brilliant Friend. Elena watched from the sidelines as her best friend sashayed into a life of comfort, buoyed by her husband Stefano’s economic success.
But how quickly fortunes shift. Book Two, The Story of a New Name, is still Lina and Elena’s story. The new name belongs to the girl who exchanged her father’s name for her husband’s yet remains confined to the old way of life, while a new life is granted to the plump, shy, awkward, girl who is able to continue her education. Womanhood awaits them both, but we see how conflicted Elena has become, feeling ever in the shadow of Lila’s magnetic beauty. The day of her marriage, Elena helps Lila prepare:
I washed her with slow, careful gestures, first letting her squat in the tub, then asking her to stand up: I still have in my ears the sound of the dripping water, and the impression that the copper of the tub had a consistency not different from Lila’s flesh, which was smooth, solid, calm. I had a confusion of feelings and thoughts: embrace her, weep with her, kiss her, pull her hair, laugh, pretend to sexual experience and instruct her in a learned voice, distancing her with words just at the moment of greatest closeness.
But in the end there was only the hostile thought that I was washing her, from her hair to the soles of her feet, early in the morning, just so that Stefano could sully her in the course of the night. I imagined her naked as she was at that moment, entwined with her husband, in the bed in the new house, while the train clattered under their windows and his violent flesh entered her with a sharp blow, like the cork pushed by the palm into the neck of a wine bottle. And it suddenly seemed to me that the only remedy against the pain I was feeling, that I would feel, was to find a corner secluded enough so that Antonio could do to me, at the same time, the exact same thing.
I posited that My Brilliant Friend is a novel of power; The Story of a New Name is about trust. In the opening scene, set some fifty years after Lila’s wedding, Elena betrays her friend’s trust, saying “I couldn’t stand feeling Lila on me and in me, even now that I was esteemed myself, even now that I had a life outside of Naples.” She dumps the journals Lila had given her for safekeeping into the Arno River, but then she turns back and tells Lila’s story to us, her readers, so that we’ll remember Lila, and the old neighborhood, forever.
Lila and Stefano’s marriage is built on sand, but it is a castle they manage to rebuild over and over again in the early years. Lila trusts her cleverness and beauty will protect what she most wants: control; Stefano trusts his position as husband and provider will allow him the same. Elena knows better than to put her faith in Lila, but she does, time and again, until her best friend shatters her heart. The young man whose affections she has been pining for since childhood turns his brooding eye to Lila, the young bride. The affair becomes Lila’s undoing, while at the same time Elena begins her slow rise, far from Naples and whirlpool of tradition and family. She escapes Lila’s fate:
I saw clearly the mothers of the old neighborhood. They were nervous, they were acquiescent. They were silent, with tight lips and stooping shoulders, or they yelled terrible insults at the children who harassed them. Extremely thin, with hollow eyes and cheeks, or with broad behinds, swollen ankles, heavy chests, they lugged shopping bags and small children who clung to their skirts. They had been consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers, whom they ultimately came to resemble, because of their labors or the arrival of old age, of illness. When did that transformation begin? With housework? With pregnancies? With beatings?
But Elena cannot escape the dream that is Lila, the girl whom she knows to be more intelligent, quicker, more articulate—the real scholar. Elena handwrites a draft of a novel and offers it as a university graduation gift to a boyfriend, who passes it along to his mother, a book editor. And suddenly she is swept up in success. But it is Lila’s spirit that wrote Elena's book, even though it came from Elena’s hands. Elena discovers The Blue Fairy, a short novel Lila had written as a child, and realizes Lila’s words and voice are
the secret heart of my book. Anyone who wanted to know what gave it warmth and what the origin was of the strong but invisible thread that joined the sentences would have had to go back to that child’s packet, ten notebook pages, . . . the brightly colored cover, the title and not even a signature.
And in a gesture of trust and love for her friend, Elena returns the story to Lila, admitting, “I read it again and discovered that, without realizing it, I’ve always had it in my mind. That’s where my book comes from.” It is the story of a new name.
Yet would seem too late for redemption from Elena. Lila is lost, a fallen woman, the transformation Elena observed and dreaded a few years earlier in the wives of the old neighborhood has overcome her friend. Lila tosses her story into the flames and Elena leave Naples.
But Elena and Lila are still young, only in their mid-twenties, and there is still so much of their stories yet to tell. ...more
Creepy and spare, this will not be among my favorite of McEwan's remarkable oeuvre. And yet. The Comfort of Strangers was published nearly thirty-fiveCreepy and spare, this will not be among my favorite of McEwan's remarkable oeuvre. And yet. The Comfort of Strangers was published nearly thirty-five years ago and there is a timelessness about its tone and the shadowy, shuddery story. Perhaps because its setting-Venice (unnamed, but sketched down to the detail of aroma of decay and filtered sunlight)-has not changed. McEwan carefully withheld markers of politics and pop culture, as if somehow knowing the story's potential to live past its Last-Days-of-Disco era. It's fascinating to read this early novel, McEwan's second, to see the same elegant, structured prose, but absent of the warmth and humanity he's achieved in later works. The Comfort of Strangers is like a highly-stylized, black-and-white neo-noir, where the actors say profound things that make little sense. But it's still pretty cool. ...more
My Brilliant Friend, the first in Elena Ferrante’s quartet about best friends from a Naples ghetto, is a novel about power: who holds it, how it is woMy Brilliant Friend, the first in Elena Ferrante’s quartet about best friends from a Naples ghetto, is a novel about power: who holds it, how it is won and lost, and what happens when power shifts occur. It is a story of violence: domestic and cultural, physical and emotional. All this, in a novel about two young girls exploring friendship and adolescence in post-war southern Italy.
Elena Greco and Lila Cerrullo are daughters of working class families, growing up in a crowded, poor, electrifying neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples in the mid-1950s. Elena recounts their adolescence from the remove of middle age, stating:
I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it 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.
Parents beat their children, brothers beat their sisters, husbands beat their wives, and the wealthy Solara brothers keep iron rods in the boot of their sports car, so handy for street fights.
But Elena and Lila are part of a blossoming generation, one that—like the city of Naples itself—is rising out of the traditions of violence and oppression that go hand in hand with poverty into something brighter. Or so it appears at the beginning. By the end of this first installment of Ferrante’s epic Neapolitan series, it seems Fate lifts up one of these young women while holding the other hostage to her culture.
Lila is a force that defies definition. A scrawny child, she is like an orphan in a Victorian melodrama: all skin and bones, street smarts and fearlessness. The neighborhood and its residents—from her family, her schoolmates and teachers to the boys who are enchanted by the flare of her intelligence and her eventual swan-like beauty—are blank slates upon which Lila mercilessly etches her vision, her truth.
And yet, such promise in a young girl with a sparkling intellect is thwarted by her own ambition. Money is what Lila seeks to yank her from the doom of the women around her: marriage and children before they are twenty, followed by decades of drudgery, their beauty a brief flame snuffed out by duty, submission, ignorance. Lila’s childhood dream of becoming a famous novelist is replaced by the more practical plans of starting a luxury shoe business with her troubled older brother, Rino. But even that scheme is pounded out of possibility by their cobbler father, until one of Lila’s suitors steps in with salvation. Ironically, it is Lila’s beauty that offers her the kind of power she can’t reach even with her preternatural intelligence.
...something had begun to emanate from Lila's mobile body that males sensed, an energy that dazed them, like the swelling sound of beauty arriving. The music had to stop before they returned to themselves, with uncertain smiles and extravagant applause.
The tension of female friendship has rarely been so sharply and tenderly displayed in literature. Elena is objective neither with herself nor with Lila, and the push-pull of loathing and love is keenly felt. From the moment Lila drops Elena’s beloved doll into a hole, your sympathies are torn between these two girls, one so cruel and strong and vulnerable, the other naïve and graceless. Elena follows in Lila’s wake, helpless against Lila’s fierce charisma. Although it is Elena who is granted the opportunity to pursue an education beyond middle school, it is Lila who directs her learning. Lila quizzes her, mocks her, competes with her. It is Lila who learns her Latin declensions first, and best. If Elena studies Greek, Lila checks out the available dictionaries from the library. By high school, Elena finds herself formulating her thoughts and arguments as Lila would, using her diction. Elena moves forward in guilt mixed with a sense of triumph—it is she who is offered the education, despite knowing the Lila is her intellectual superior.
Ferrante’s writing is stripped to the bone, but the marrow within is so rich and satisfying. This world of post-war Naples is vivid and visceral, every line colored in with careful detail. Elena returns from several weeks of summer holiday to find
...the sun had made me shining blonde, but my face, my arms, my legs were as if painted with dark gold. As long as I had been immersed in the colors of Ischia, amid sunburned faces, my transformation had seemed suitable; now, restored to the context of the neighborhood, where every face, every street had a sick pallor, it seemed to me excessive, anomalous.
The family dynamics (and there is a helpful Index of Characters at the beginning) are free-ranging and messy, feeding directly into the sea of village life—secrets are on full display, feuds are fast and furious, and allegiances change as peace is brokered, then broken. These characters will consume your heart.
My Brilliant Friend ends with Lila seeming to give into the inevitable: marriage at the age of sixteen. But recall that this is a story of power. And this story has only just begun.
One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me.
And so begins Olga's descent into the heart of her own darknes
One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me.
And so begins Olga's descent into the heart of her own darkness. The Days of Abandonment packs a wallop of tension and cringe-inducing desperation into 188 pages of elegantly-rendered narrative. This isn't the story of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, this is THE nervous breakdown, in all its raw ugliness. We may tut-tut as we read Olga's hair-raising mayhem, but really, isn't this what we fear, in the wee hours, in our most vulnerable moments? As Shakespeare's Polonius declares in Hamlet, "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't."
The method is familiar: husband leaves wife for younger woman (in this instance, the very young daughter of a former family friend). Wife, who hasn't worked outside the home for many years, is left with the children, the house, the bills, and her own aging body. Disbelief, depression, anger, the divvying up of friends, the hope and fear of running into the ex and his paramour ensue. But Olga's madness? There is nothing expected in the way Elena Ferrante portrays Olga's domestic drama.
Olga's recounting of her freefall is detached and unsentimental. She tells it some years distant, but I also wonder if there is not some translation styling at work here. Although Ann Goldstein has translated all Ferrante's Europa Editions-published works, so I have to assume her tone is true to the author's own.
Contrary to that sense of emotional detachment, The Days of Abandonment is an intensely physical story. Olga is both obsessed with and horrified by her body, which at thirty-eight is showing the inevitable signs of age. She ruminates frequently about sex, reducing it to a purely animal act, torturing herself with images of her husband Mario, and his young lover, and then seducing her neighbor in a pathetic cry to recapture her crushed sexual self. Ferrante uses pain-an errant piece of glass in pasta sauce that pierces the roof of Mario's mouth; the threat of a mother to cut off her daughter's hands with sewing shears; a child's forehead smashing into the windshield to the sound of screeching car brakes--to frame Olga's sanity. It's almost as though pain is a stand-in for emotion: as long as Olga can envision pain and feel it, she'll be alright. She had reinforced locks put in the front door and at her lowest point, she struggles to open the locks, finally resorting to using her teeth. At one point, Olga asks her daughter Ilaria to poke her with a paper cutter if her concentration wanders
I immediately pulled my mouth away from the key, it seemed to me that my face was hanging to one side like the coiled skin of an orange after the knife has begin to peel it. ...For a while I let myself sink into desperation, which would mold me thoroughly, make me metal, door panel, mechanism, like an artist who works directly on his body. Then I noticed on my left thigh, above the knee, a painful gash. A cry escaped me, I realized Ilaria had left a deep wound.
Most disturbing is the toll Olga's depression takes on her children and Otto, the family dog. The upsetting scenes of abuse and neglect may well kill any empathy you develop for Olga as an abandoned woman. But without them, Ferrante's narrative would simply be a mildly prurient glimpse into the life of the newly forsaken.
Olga wrestles with her post-abandonment identity, and her struggle is an alarm bell the author sounds relentlessly as she mocks the absurd circumstance of marriage that calls upon women to set aside their professions and their physical freedom, to attend to home, family, husband.
I had carried in my womb his children; I had given him children. Even if I tried to tell myself that I had given him nothing, ... Still I couldn't avoid thinking what aspects of his nature inevitably lay hidden in them. Mario would explode suddenly from inside their bones, now, over the days, over the years, in ways that were more and more visible. How much of him would I be forced to love forever, without even realizing it, simply by virtue of the fact that I loved them? What a complex, foamy mixture a couple is. Even if the relationship shatters and ends, it continues to act in secret pathways, it doesn't die, it doesn't want to die.
"What a complex, foamy mixture a couple is..." Indeed. Foamy. An interesting choice of word. So sensual, evocative, invoking the fluids of sex, but also foaming at the mouth- a sign of madness, a rabidity of rage.
The Days of Abandonment is frank, gutting, oddly funny, and awfully sad. But it is not without hope, and throughout you are reminded that Olga survives her madness. Even swirling in its whirlpool, she has one hand above water, reaching, grasping.
Elena Ferrante's brilliance is withholding her judgment of her characters. She writes their truth and allows readers to create their own morality. Her writing, though not warm, is full of heat. The carapace of narrative rage cracks to reveal tender new skin beneath....more
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