Tag: Female friendship

The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

 

Female-silhouette
Elena Ferrante is/might-be the pseudonymous name of an Italian writer. Publicity shy, she only accepts interviews by email. There are no photos of her online. James Wood, The New Yorker critic has deduced … a number of her letters have been collected and published. From them, we learn that she grew up in Naples, and has lived for periods outside Italy. She has a classics degree; she has referred to being a mother. One could also infer from her fiction and from her interviews that she is not now married…In addition to writing, “I study, I translate, I teach.”

… the story of the facts has to reckon with filters, deferments, partial truths, half lies: from it comes as arduous measurement of time passed that is based completely on the unreliable measuring device of words.

That … what are writers stuck with? … the unreliable measuring device of words.

Every tone of voice, every possible meaning of words spoken, every possible meaning of words unspoken, the way they dress, walk, cry, smile, serve the pasta, look, and stand; all are analysed by Elena, the first-person narrator, in her attempt to understand what’s going on. It’s a Brugel-esque landscape of feelings colouring the lives of the Neapolitan working class in the 1960s and all seen through the eyes of Elena Greco  -“always fearful, always subordinate, always pleasingly willing”, the unmarried, bookish one with glasses.

Elena Greco:  I said to myself every day: 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. This could easily be Lina’s creed too.

The title refers to Elena’s brilliant friend, Lina Cerullo and her new name now that she’s married, her married name, Lina Carracci, and, of course, Elena can’t be everywhere, especially in Lina and Stephano’s hotel room on their disastrous wedding night, but we get the scene, in the third person. Ferrante doesn’t need to justify how the narrator, Elena, knows what happened, she does (Lina told me) and clumsily so. However, there are other instances when the narration slips from the first to the third person unannounced. It’s OK. It’s a legitimate literary device, unnoticeable if attention is not drawn to it. It allows a flow of action or insight. This inconsistency is something the editor should’ve picked up. Ferrante is usually masterful at using these literary tools. Quotation marks, and ‘he said’, ‘she said’ are abandoned at times in the frenzy of verbal, sexual, or social violence giving the scene a filmic quality, making the action jump out of the flat page. This is good stuff, but doesn’t need justification.

The story is about Lina’s marriage that fell apart at the wedding at the end of Book One and how it continues on its downhill slide while Elena continues to bump against her upbringing and pursue an academic life, free – she thinks – from her stifling Neapolitan history; but Elena by this book’s end still believes Lina, despite her choices, is the more beautiful, the more intelligent.

Thank god there’s a glossary of families and family members at the front of the book. Ten families and their intra and extra familial relationships make up the fodder of the story and the glossary is well needed; and don’t be afraid to use it (no-one will know). Things get complicated especially with diminutives, family nicknames, and similarities; Alfonso, Antonio, Lina, Linu, which is a diminutive of Elena, not Lina whose real name is Raffaella. See? And don’t skip over the Italian family names, Cerullo, Cappuccio, Scanno, Solara. Say them out loud! You need to be familiar with them all and if you say them, you’ll be saying them a lot, right from the beginning so it won’t take long before you’re at one with the family, families. You’ll be in among them all. That’s the best bit.

The worst bit is the fate of the women. Not only are they treated like shit by all of the men – except when they want something, usually sex – their worst enemies are the other women: mothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, and  friends. Shame, gossip, inference, innuendo, treachery, lies, superstition, and pride are all weapons these Neapolitan women use against their own. And Elena sails bumpily, battered and bruised, but defiant, through it all, but ultimately aware that she is a woman and people see her more clearly, listen to her more intently, talk to her more respectfully, when she is on the arm, even metaphorically, of a man. Have things changed?

And then the story splits: Elena goes to study in Pisa, and Lina’s messy life of deception, abandoned commercial success, and personal war-mongering continues to engulf everyone in her circle of destructive intent and selfishness. Here I wanted to hear more about Elena, but I had to wait.

And then this:

One morning I bought a graph-paper notebook and began to write, in the third person, about what happened to me that night on the beach near Barano. Then, still in the third person, I wrote what happened to me on Ischia. Then I wrote a little about Naples and the neighborhood. Then I changed names and places and situations. Then I imagined a dark force crouching in the life of the protagonist, an entity that had the capacity to weld the world around her, with the colors of the flame of a blowtorch: a blue violet dome where everything went well for her, shooting sparks, but that soon came apart, breaking up into meaningless gray fragments. I spent twenty days writing this story, a period in which I saw no one, I went out only to eat. Finally, I reread some pages, I didn’t like them, and I forgot about it.

This is Elena Greco explaining herself, describing what changed her life, but it is more; it is a confession from Ferrante: how to write a novel. It’s finding the ‘dark force’ that’s the tricky bit. However, it’s this notebook, hand-written, unedited, that she gives as a gift – despite “I reread some pages, I didn’t like them” – and it’s this notebook that finds it’s way into literary circles, someone types it and shows it to a publisher and …

When Elena and Lina finally re-unite it’s in the most unlikely of places; two women, one about to be hoisted aloft, the other about as low as she can go but united by a shared intellect, history, and belief in the other, no mater how sorely that belief is tested. One ignored the upbringing they both had no control over; the other gave in to it. And like the end of Book One, My Brilliant Friend, this, Book Two, has a sting on the last page that compels you, no matter what you might think, to move on as quickly as possible to Book Three, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. Ferrante is a reading experience like no other.

You can purchase the book, in various formats including the ebook, here.

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My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

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My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
When we watch a film we have to assume that everything we see is what the film-maker wants us to see: that dreadful yellow coat the woman on the left is wearing in the airport scene is delibate; the bad hair on the star in the night-club scene is also deliberate. This book reminded me that the same assumption applies to books.

My Brilliant Friend begins with a series of events, reminisesces by the narrator, Elena, about her friend, Lila, the ‘brilliant friend’ of the title. They are scenes like, ‘I remember one day when she …’ and ‘and then one evening when we were six she ….’ Ferrante is colouring a picture which isn’t going anywhere. There is no clear narrative, no feeling of time passing. I was getting impatient and a little frustrated; and then the teacher in me was getting annoyed at the sloppy grammar, the confusing pronouns, and the profuse scattering of seemingly random commas, as if from a sloppy pen: comma splices proliferate like ants.

And then on page 74 I came across this line …

“Trained by our school books to speak with great skill about what we had never seen, we were excited by the invisable.”

I found this line profound. I read it again. Thought about it and read it again. That’s when I was reminded about the veracity of the above assumption. I was forced to find a reason for the grammatical sloppiness and such a reason wasn’t hard to find. The voice is extremely informal, like a mate sitting with you over a coffee latte telling you a story. It’s very conversational and, I eventually conceeded, intentionally so. In fact about half way through the book Elena eventually receives a longed for letter from Lila and describes it thus,

“The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face; it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, of the confusion of the oral; it had the vivid orderliness that I imagined would belong to conversation if one were so fortunate to be born with the head of Zeus.”

This description of Lila’s writing as ‘vivid orderliness’ as if from the gods put Ferrante’s writing into focus as ‘the dross of speech’ and ‘the confusion of the oral’ and I understood that the sloppy grammar and punctuation had a purpose; it was a writerly technique designed to create the conversational tone and the confusion of the oral just as Lila’s letter wasn’t.

My Brilliant Friend is about self awareness and female friendship told by an elderly Elena Greco looking back at her lifelong friend, Lila Cerullo, from 3 years old to 16 years old, childhood and adolescence. Elena is the third-person narrator but very much part of the action; it feels like an autobiography.

Lilia’s family, like all the families in this book, is scarred with fillial violence. “What do you mean by love?” Lilia murmured to her brother, “what does love mean for our family?” Love seems to be at the heart of everything but it’s rarely visable. The Neapolitan characters, especially the men, wear their arrogance and ego so confidently and so visably but when it is challenged even ever so slightly they react as if such confidence and ego were tissue-thin: a side-ways glance is responded to as if a stab in the back; a smirk, a snide remark, as if a throat is cut, a eye gouged out and revenge is metered out ruthlessly.

This threat of violence is ever present, and terrifying since when it erupts it is life-threatening; not just between husband and wife but between father a daughter, brother and sister and usually over the purpetrator being made to feel foolish by circumstances that no-one has control over. It is the women who suffer the most. The blame, when its origins are unclear or undefinable, is always planted on a woman: a truely mysoginistic culture. Ferrante describes it as common-place, like doing the washing up and putting out the garbage. It is part of the fabric of their lives.

Despite what I said at the opening of this review the seemingly anacdotal descriptions give way to a narrative and a time-line slowly evolves and towards the end of this book, the first of a trilogy, tension and narrative builds slowly but firmly to Lila’s wedding day, at the age of sixteen, as a final act threatens to explode everyone’s lives. You don’t get the explosion, just the gasp, as someone who shouldn’t be there walks into the room, sits, crosses his legs, shows off his gleaming new shoes; the explosion, we assume, must open book two in the series. What a cliff-hanger!

We know that Elena Ferrante was born in Naples, and that’s about it. If you google images of her you get several pictures of Italian looking women which, if you pursue them, lead nowhere or to women who have written about Ferrante. However on ‘her’ website I found this …
” … guesswork around Ferrante’s identity proliferated, with reviewers speculating that “she” might be a mother, a man, or a sentient cabal of fire-ants,” says a reviewer Katy Waldman in her article for Slate (an online journal) heralding the Paris Review’s coup at gettng the first in-person interview with Elena Ferrante; in their Spring 2015 issue. So, soon, we may find out more about this intriguing writer that no-one has up until now seen and no-one up until The Paris Review has seemingly spoken to.

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My Dream of You by Nuala O’Faolain (noola o fway lorn)

Nuala O'Faolain
Nuala O’Faolain

I loved this book!

After the international success of O’Faolain’s memoir Are You Somebody? this novel, her first, was published in 2001 and in a brief Afterward she acknowledges “splendid energetic advice” from fellow Irish writer Colm Toibin who recently opined that

“… in autobiographical writing your [the writer’s] job is to create illusion, to work with rhythm and image and detail to make the reader feel that whatever is on the page matters and must have happened.”

I would venture to say that this also applies to writing in the first person, memoir or fiction, since the first person point of view is meant to make the reader believe the protagonist is also the writer. I recently complained that in The Cast Iron Shore, Linda Grant’s debut novel, that I reviewed on this blog recently (posted January 27), Grant failed her first person POV responsibilities by inadvertantly creating a disconnect between the protagonist and the writer: they seemed like two different people.

O’Faolain does not make the same mistake. Although a novel (fiction), My Dream of You reads like a memoir, feels like a memoir; so skilfully does O’Faolain make you believe, using “rhythm and image and detail” that her story actually happened to her. Having read her first memoir there is a lot of O’Faolain’s past in Kathleen’s but autobiography and fiction are interwoven seemlessly. How do I know this? I cared about her.

Kathleen de Burca is an Irish travel writer fast approaching fifty, and with a waist to match, who travels the world, usually with her best friend, an gay American man called Jimmy, writing travel copy for her boss, and also close friend, Alex. These two men, and staff in the office in London, serve as her family, since she has all but abandoned hers, and her country, many years before. Then there is her boyfriend, Hugo, a law student, who interests her in a divorce case from the annals of Irish history: the young wife of an English aristocrat, on a forlorn Irish estate in the middle of nowhere, is accused of infidelity with her husband’s Irish groom, a very common man. In those days, the 1850’s, a divorce needed an act of parliament so the event is well documented although from a very English point of view. The wife is chastised, forsaken, deprived of her young daughter, and locked up in an asylum where she inevitably goes mad.

Kathleen is intrigued and fascinated by this tragedy and when Jimmy, her moral compass, suddenly dies she takes leave of her job (Hugo, the boyfriend, she betrayed and lost) and travels to Ireland to, maybe, write a book about this young wife and her passion for a comman man.

The book has three narrative arcs: Kathleen’s journey to Ireland, her adventures, and the brief reunion with her siblings and their families; her memories of her arrogant, distant, and emotionally violent father, her deeply unhappy and useless mother, and her friends and lovers; and the story from the 1850s of Marianne and her affair with the lowly William Mullen. Yes, there is a book within the book.

She thinks she is going to Ireland to research a story about someone else’s passion but what she actually does is confront passion in her own life and what she discovers is not what she expected.

The writing of the Marianne’s story (in the third person) begins confidently and the affair with Mullen is handled expertly: O’Faolain makes the reader understand how intense physical attraction can operate outside the realms of reason; but Kathleen discovers another document that proports to prove that … well, I don’t want to spoil it for you. There is here the flavour of a mystery to be solved.

O’Faolain’s literary skills are put to good use as she weaves the first and third narratives into a shared ending which also ends the book itself. Very satisfying.

My Dream of You is about love, sex, family, and aging, and it contains one of the best descriptions I have ever read of female friendship – how it works – and how emotional love with a woman can be far more rewarding and long-lasting than sexual love with a man. Mind you, Kathleen has a lot of experience with sexual love with men and she understands, and shows, that passion is far more complex and evolutionary than romantic books make out; and she comes to realize that her relationship with her body is also a part of the ‘passion’ equation and far from what she would like it to be, or thought it was. She is, or was, a beautiful woman and there are magic passages where a beautiful woman talks about being beautiful, without pride or sentiment, and when she believed it and when she didn’t. This is unusual stuff.

Nuala O’Faolain was engaged once but never married, had a fifteen year relationship with the Irish journalist, Nell McCarthy, but spent her latter years with a New York lawyer, John Low-Beer. She was diagnosed with metastatic cancer in 2008. Hugo Hamilton, whose memoir The Speckled People I recently reviewed on this blog (posted February 10), was a friend of O’Faolain’s and his 2014 novel Every Single Minute is a fictionalised retelling of a trip he took with the very ill O’Faolain to Berlin just before she died (May 9 2008).

She wrote two volumes of memoir Are You Somebody: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman (1996), and Almost There: The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman (2003); another novel published posthumously in 2009 Best Love, Rosie; and a ‘history with commentary’ The Story of Chicago May (2005). Chicago May was the nickname of Mary Ann Duignan, an Irish criminal, who became famous in America, France and Britain in the beginning of the twentieth century.

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