THOSE WHO LEAVE AND THOSE WHO STAY - ELENA FERRANTE

Goddamn, she really is pulling it off. Every volume of this 4 part series has gotten much better. When writing 1,000+ pages on the same story, obviously, there is the advantage of your readers knowing so much more about the characters and their backgrounds and motives and thus having more buy-in. However, it’s also easy to lose readers by being boring or repetitive. Ferrante found a way to deliver on a plot level and to greatly deepen the themes and relevance on the world-level. In terms of plot, despite this being a realistic story about a set of pretty “normal” people and their normal lives, she’s able to keep things happening. People cheat on each other, they fight with their boss, they worry about jobs and children, they start families and break-up. The rhythm of events feels both natural and engaging enough to keep you wanting to come back and figure out what happens next. But where, to me, this volume really hits another gear is where it engages with the political realities of post-war Italy. The politics and state violence was always a sort of background hum, present but no foregrounded in the other two volumes. Here, because the main characters are older, this stuff moves from subtext to text. All of the characters have to wrestle with the meaning of the violence that typified the Italian years of lead (As an aside, if you’re unfamiliar with this period, you might want to look into it and the idea of a “strategy of tension.” Remember that the US is behind a lot of this stuff, the book specifically mentions the Piazza Fontana bombing, a terrorist act that the US knew about ahead of time and was committed by US funded fascists but pinned on communists. They ran a very similar play in Jamaica, for what it’s worth). Many of the characters we’ve followed from childhood are now militant communists or violent fascists. There is an amazing dynamic between the middle class leftist that Elena marries into and the working class leftist that she knows from the old neighborhood. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this portrayed so well. There is amazing stuff about the nature of work and the nature of money, including these two quotes: 

“The only one who behaved from the start as if the need to work didn't go hand in hand with the need to be humiliated.”

“I wondered what difference there was between their bourgeois wealth and that of the Solaras. I thought of how many hidden turns money takes before becoming high salaries and lavish fees.”

As always the friendship between the two girls (now women) is the heart of the story, even if they spend less and less time together and their lives grow apart. They still manage to circle, call-out, help-out and challenge each other. I will be amazed if Ferrante tops this volume in the last one. Will it follow these women to their deaths? We shall see.