THE STORY OF A NEW NAME - ELENA FERRANTE

I am so glad I decided to go back to this quadrilogy of Neapolitan novels from Ferrante. I liked but didn’t love the first one and I was a bit wishy-washy on whether or not to finish the series. But, boy, did this one deliver. It’s the same set-up. Lenù writes from late middle age about growing up in a poor part of Naples and her life-long friendship with Lila. They’re older so we now follow them from the time Lila is married, at 16, to when Lenù is graduating from college. The first book, since it is about them as children, is more about painting this complex world of post-war Italy, filled with Camorristas, communists, the rich and poor, hierarchies of language and dialect, life-destroying misogyny and all the rest, through a child’s eyes, so these forces are only hinted it. In this book, the characters join the adult world so this is all much more explicit. The main characters are still poor women from a poor region, so they still are not in the mainstream of political and cultural life, but they are much more aware of it, how they fit into it, and strategies for finding their place in it. The relationship between these two women is so rich and deep it’s hard to wrap your head all the way around. They love each other, they’re bitter rivals, they admire each other, they hate and resent each other, often all at once and never with either one of them understanding the whole dynamic. This time we get lots of other characters chiming in and giving us their take on the two. The central issue of their relationship, that they are both very smart (tho, the difference between very hard-working and natural genius are also explored) but they’re poor and women. Against these odds, Lenù figures out a way out. She and Lila both are identified towards the end of the last book as having tremendous promise, and Lenù’s parents give her a modicum of support while Lila’s do not. Lenù moves on and Lila doesn’t. This book also introduces the idea that Lenù has access to diaries that Lila wrote at the time and so we get lots of scenes that Lenù wasn’t there for as well as some of Lila’s thoughts. There is the added dimension about how their love lives now intersect which pays off quite well and an interesting angle about Lila being perhaps smarter but much less willing to play the game. This book was very nice to sink into and read in chunks every day. There is always something interesting happening and the cumulative effect gets greater each page. I wonder about the translation, there are many times when it’s remarked upon that someone is speaking in dialect and I wonder if, in the Italian original, this is actually in Neapolitan, would the average modern Italian understand whatever slur they’re using? Anyway, I’m glad there are two more of these.