“The future might pour in a different shape”: Doris Lessing and Elena Ferrante / Pamela Thurschwell

“We can’t stop talking about Elena Ferrante” we said to each other throughout 2016—on social media, in the classroom, in pressing the Neapolitan novels upon friends and relatives. This collection of essays on Ferrante emerges from a conference panel at the Modern Language Association convention in Philadelphia in January, 2017, convened by the Prose Fiction Division. The pseudonymous Italian writer, who chooses not to reveal herself beyond her writing, had come to new popularity in the US in the past few years, and we found we had a lot to say about feminism, rage, women’s friendships, genre clashes, and bad sex, amongst other topics. We still can’t stop talking about Ferrante, and we trust that when you read these lively, provocative essays, you too will join the chorus.

—Hester Blum, MLA panel moderator

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“I’m always surprised when someone points out as a flaw the fact that my stories contain no possibility of transcendence.”¹

Behind this short essay hovers a general question about what two brilliant, cranky novelists, who are simultaneously feminist and uncompromisingly critical of feminism; bitter and enabling of hope; grounded in historical realism and radically experimental, might have to offer an audience at this terrifying political moment. This moment for me, is characterized by the structuring misogyny of November 2016’s election season. (For me this boiled down to: boasting about sexual assault does not make you unelectable. In fact, it probably gets you a few more votes.) I find myself returning to the image of women, in the privacy of voting booths, voting for Donald Trump. I know there are comprehensible reasons why women voted for Trump. No one needs to explain this to me; I read those articles too. But that image will not leave my mind. A Lessing or Ferrante could make something out of this voting booth scene. They are good on women making bad mistakes about men, and on how the outside becomes the inside—how the publically sanctioned state of subjection to masculine culture is internalized, even by strong, politicized, self-critical women. Writing this paper, for me, meant engaging with the voting booth scene. Thinking about Elena Ferrante and Doris Lessing after Trump’s election means asking questions like what the hell happened to feminism?

I remember feeling similar things watching the TV series Mad Men a few years ago. At some point I realized Mad Men was actually Waiting for Godot, but for feminism. First feminism doesn’t arrive, once, and then it doesn’t arrive again. Ferrante’s and Lessing’s novels, amongst other things, are great guides for the business of trying to understand the ways in which feminism keeps not arriving.

In this essay, I offer a few brief points of contact between Ferrante and Lessing. The connection I will address least explicitly here is how their writing has been represented as coextensive with their lives, not just by critics who make the wearily familiar collapse between a woman writer’s life and her work—but also through explicit moves on both of their parts—moves which simultaneously fend off and invite this collapse. Although they appear to be polar opposites—Lessing mined her life for her work over the years, and novels such as The Golden Notebook invite speculation about which real life people characters are based on, while Ferrante explicitly tried to avoid having her identity exposed—they also share a skilled manipulation of the masculinist critical assumption that all women’s writing will inevitably be autobiographical. They make lemonade from essentialist lemons.

Other obvious connections: Ferrante and Lessing both focus on women involved in radical politics and radical sexual relations whose strongest primary relation is with another woman, and who may or may not be “free women” as the ironically titled embedded novel in The Golden Notebook proclaims. As Margaret Drabble writes in a review of Ferrante:

“Ferrante takes on many of the issues raised in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962) . . . . Lessing’s novel was a heady mix of feminism (a label that she disclaimed), Marxism and madness. Ferrante takes us into similar territory, as she, too, endeavours to combine the personal with the political. (Her descriptions of Lina’s crazy moments of ‘dissolving boundaries’ recall the passages evoking Anna Wulf’s madness.)”²

Ferrante and Lessing are both fascinated by hallucinatory states that break down the boundaries and structures that uphold imprisoning, conventional social forms, including relations between the sexes, or adherence to the Communist party line. The threat of madness is central to The Golden Notebook but I’m also thinking of the strange fugue-like interludes exploring the ghostly house in The Memoirs of a Survivor, and many other moments in Lessing’s work.

The dissolution of these boundaries, although dangerous to the individual, can also be productive, even revelatory. In The Golden Notebook, Anna says to her Jungian analyst, Mother Sugar:

“If I’d said, Yesterday I met a man at a party and suddenly he said something, and I thought, Yes, there’s a hint of something—there’s a crack in that man’s personality like a gap in a dam, and through that gap the future might pour in a different shape—terrible perhaps, or marvellous, but something new—if I said that, you’d frown.”³

This is, of course, tentative because hypothetical—Anna is here ascribing a visionary state of being to an imaginary man (one who is also met in a scene of an imagined pick-up at a party; revelation is eroticized, and not dependant on the woman’s own agency. It is the man here who has the power to break the social order). Further, Anna says this to her analyst who she knows will disapprove of this allegory of self-destruction as new creation. However, Lessing and Ferrante are both drawn to these gaps. They simultaneously valorize and fear a violent and disturbing experimentation with the self. For Ferrante Lila is the main carrier of this possibility; in Lessing by contrast, the gap emerges from the impasse of the heterosexual relation. The break that ignites a different future, at the end of The Golden Notebook, involves the lovers, Saul and Anna, going mad—but their shared madness, and their support for each other works to gets them past their writers’ blocks—makes it possible for them to split up (or maybe split apart) and to write again. Amanda Anderson in Bleak Liberalism uses the passage I’ve just quoted as one example of the tension in The Golden Notebook between modernist experimentation and a humanist recuperation of the self in Lessing’s work.⁴

Ferrante also speaks of this kind of creative and debilitating madness, calling it frantumaglia, a word she says she takes from her mother:

My mother left me a word in her dialect that she used to describe how she felt when she was racked by contradictory sensations that were tearing her apart. She said that inside her she had a frantumaglia. . . It was the word for a disquiet not otherwise definable, it referred to a miscellaneous crowd of things in her head, debris in a muddy water of the brain . . . The frantumaglia is an unstable landscape, an infinite aerial or aquatic mass of debris that appears to the I, brutally, as its true and unique inner self. The frantumaglia is the storehouse of time without the orderliness of a history, a story.⁵

The frantumaglia is the part of us that escapes any reduction to words or other shapes, and that in moments of crisis dissolves the entire order within which it seemed to us we were stably inserted.⁶

It is important that Ferrante claims the word that describes this destabilizing, personal, but also politicalcrisis, as a maternal legacy, tied in to women speaking and the dissolution of speech. Frantumaglia is connected to maternity in the books via an old, by now perhaps almost critically exhausted, dichotomy between maternity and writing (which also maps loosely on to other familiar gendered dichotomies, such as that between the body and representation, or altruism and ego). This split claims that one precludes the other: you can be a good mother OR a good writer; you can have a novel or a baby, but not both. This structuring dichotomy was critiqued by, but also replicated in, some of the 1970s and 80s psychoanalytic and poststructuralist feminism that interests Ferrante. (One can imagine we might find it in Lenu’s book that becomes a feminist classic). Lessing and Ferrante, engage this division in interestingly productive ways, even as they apparently resign themselves, and their characters, violently, even shockingly, to its dictates.

In a central scene of the Free Women section of Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, the character Molly’s unhappy, unanchored son, Tommy, in his early 20s comes to see Anna, who is in the position of a second mother to him. Anna lets him read her writing notebooks / diaries that are on her kitchen table. After reading one section—a suicide fantasy, Tommy says:

“Do you realize the whole of this notebook, the blue one, is either newspaper cuttings or bits like the blood and brain bit, all bracketed off, or crossed out; and then entries like buying tomatoes or tea?”⁷

Tommy’s intervention dramatizes the ongoing aesthetic-generic-political problems the left and the novel itself face: What can constitute the best that art can do for this historical moment? Anna cannot decide whether there is any point to writing novels rather than engaging with politics; those who do keep writing novels grapple with formal question of representing the chaos and dread of modern existence amidst the collapse of the Communist ideal and postwar nuclear fears. Do the times call for modernist experiment and fragmentation, or realism? (The Golden Notebook, of course, provides both.)   But more starkly still, Tommy’s reading of Anna’s notebooks provokes an action beyond an aesthetic-political crisis. Tommy leaves Anna, goes home, and shoots himself. Although he survives his suicide attempt he is blinded. Are Anna’s notebooks to blame for this in some way? Does women’s writing drive children to suicide? The novel seems to want its readers to ask this question, even as it defuses the answer both by redeeming Tommy (he becomes happier, more self-sufficient, more political, living as a blind person—he even finds love) and by revealing that the Tommy story was fictional—part of an embedded novel rather than a framing narrative.

There is a parallel between this incident and the complex dynamics in Ferrante around women, writing, and motherhood. The Neapolitan Quartet focuses on the expropriation of women’s writing in various forms (by men, but also by Lenù). Numerous examples abound: Lenù’s conviction that everything she writes has been stolen from Lila; Lenù destroys Lila’s notebooks that Lila has given her to protect, but she also watches in horror while Lila burns the rescued manuscript of her story “The Blue Fairy.” Men also often steal women’s writing or systematically ignore it: Nino, jealous of Lenù’s skill with words, makes sure her article is never printed in the paper; Pietro doesn’t read Lenu’s novel, etc.

Writing, then, and maybe even moreso, stolen writing, is of central importance to identity in the books. For Lenù, Lila, is the woman who doesn’t write or rather who is suspected of writing secretly, a writing that would be magical if it existed—that would be more like life than writing, like presence. For Lenù writing matters, but Lila matters even more. As Lenù’s daughter Dede says:

“It’s impossible to have a real relationship with you, the only things that count are work and Aunt Lina; there’s nothing that’s not swallowed up inside them.”⁸

With Dede’s accusation it seems that children always must be secondary. They, like women’s writing at other points in the books, are easily expropriated, passed along to others or lost (even as the hard material work of maternity and housekeeping in the poverty stricken neighborhood, is also brutally represented). This expropriation happens most obviously and tragically, in the mysterious disappearance of Lila’s daughter Tina that gives The Story of the Lost Child, the final novel in the quartet, its title.

Tina’s disappearance is also connected by Lila to women’s writing. Toward the end of the book Lila tells Lenù that she thinks Tina’s kidnapping was a case of mistaken identity—that the kidnappers might have thought Tina was Lenù’s daughter because of a newspaper story about her novel that exposed the criminal Naples of their upbringing. In this newspaper story Lenù was photographed with Tina, mislabelled as her own daughter. “They thought they were stealing your daughter and instead they stole mine.”⁹ In Lila’s version of the story of the Lost Child—not definitive by any means—women’s writing is deadly for the child; it eclipses her, makes her become forgotten, makes the bad mother (the mother who writes) a target for revenge. Lenù’s novel, then, in Lila’s telling, kills a child, or at least makes her disappear. Does women’s writing, then, in Ferrante and Lessing, threaten the reproduction of the social order by erasing children? A kind of No Future gesture?¹⁰ How might we relate this question to the lost dolls that arrive, mysteriously, at the end of the book, after Lila has absented herself from Lenù’s writing, and from her life? Another way of putting this question might be: are the dolls more like novels or more like children in the economy of the novels? And does our answer to this question affect how we understand the source of Lila’s enthralling power for the novels and for Lenù?

Despite the obvious differences in class, in nationality, in the historical situations from which they write, Lessing’s and Ferrante’s works have a lot in common. They demand to be read in contradictory ways: as romance, as feminist how-to books, as inspiration, as histories of radical politics that fail, and fail in relation to feminism, as books that people love with a passion that may at times seem excessive. In Ferrante and Lessing we can recognize a version of Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism; every woman in the novels lives with and desires objects or structures, or perhaps, genres, that prevent her from flourishing, objects such as heterosexual romance, maternity, publishing novels, or party politics.¹¹ As these appear to be the only structures on offer, Ferrante’s and Lessing’s novels act out the breakdown of the structures that hold up their characters’ worlds when they gesture towards frantamuglia. But if in The Golden Notebook, at the end, women’s writing might be one tentative possibility for a portal through which the “future might pour in a different shape,”—the shape of the novel The Golden Notebook—in the Ferrante (of no transcendence) the stakes of writing for women are not so clear. Lila, and Lila’s lost child, will continue not to be there; or perhaps, like feminism itself, not to be there yet.

Our favorite fictional beaches

I grew up in a beach town; the salt water is in my blood. I like to read “beach reads” (whatever they are) all year round. But now that it’s summer, I feel free to shine some sunlight on all the books I love that take place at the beach!

From board books to wordless picture books, from classic middle grade novels to contemporary YAs, from evocative literary fiction to adult thrillers, there are beachy books for every type of reader. So even if you’re land-locked this summer, you can feel the sand in your toes when you pick up one of these titles.

Here are some of my all-time favorite books that take place at the beach:

(…) And Julia chose Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. Much of the second book, The Story of a New Name, takes place in an Italian beach town. (See my note above about Italian beaches!) Julia says, “I love Ferrante’s writing because she can sustain long periods of intense human emotion for hundreds of pages, and it’s riveting and exhausting. There’s no better example of this intensity than during Lenu and Lila’s summer on the beach in The Story of a New Name.”

The Emily Awards 2016

The Godfather Award for Best Sequel: The Story Of a New Name – Elena Ferrante

I really liked My Brilliant Friend but I loved The St0ry of a New Name. I felt as though MBF did all of the grunt work of establishing place and characters (so, so many characters), so that TSOANN could really get going with telling a focused, atmospheric story. Lena and Lila are some of the most complex and fully realised female characters I’ve ever come across, and I felt myself copying Ferrante in everything I wrote, for a good while after reading this. Whoever the real Ferrante is, she gets female psychology. And she gets that it’s not always men we’re mooning over.

Elena Ferrante’s #NeapolitanNovels – Book 2 Review – The Story Of A New Name

I love the first novel in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series My Brilliant Friend (you can read my review of it here), so I was very excited to read the second novel in the series – The Story Of A New Name.

Though I loved My Brilliant Friend, I was hoping to see Elena move out of her friend Lila’s suffocating sphere of emotional and psychological influence in Book 2, and I was not disappointed. Though Elena and Lila will always be connected, I thought that Elena really came into her own and established an identity separate from Lila in this second novel, which made me really interested to see how much further they develop separately in the third and fourth books as well.

The end of the book provided a pretty good cliffhanger in which one of the two protagonists is at the start of a great success and the other one has sunk into abject conditions. It really made me want to pick up Book 3 asap, even though I’m not reviewing it until early February. Meanwhile, read my review of The Story Of A New Name below.

This is the second book, following last year’s My Brilliant Friend, featuring the two friends Lila and Elena. The two protagonists are now in their twenties. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila. Meanwhile, Elena continues her journey of self-discovery. The two young women share a complex and evolving bond that brings them close at times, and drives them apart at others. Each vacillates between hurtful disregard and profound love for the other. With this complicated and meticulously portrayed friendship at the center of their emotional lives, the two girls mature into women, paying the cruel price that this passage exacts.

What I Liked

Seeing Elena come into her own. In the first half of the novel, Elena is still living in her childhood neighborhood with Lila, though she does see less of Lila due to Lila’s marriage. At first, Elena continues to seem to be mentally and emotionally subjected to Lila’s influence even when Lila is acting in a way with which Elena does not agree or that hurts Elena’s feelings. By the end of the novel, however, Elena has spent several years away from their childhood neighborhood, forming a new though faltering adult identity for herself as a person distinct from her parents, siblings, childhood friends and former acquaintances. Elena still has moments in which she does not believe in the solidity of her new hard-won success and independence. However, I could tell by the end of this installment in the series that in the next books she would be able to depart from the impoverished social reality she grew up and experience more opportunity in her personal and professional life.

The fluid and complex portrayal of romantic relationships. For the first time in this novel we see the protagonists, Elena and Lila, grappling with the often unsavory realities of actual grown up romantic relationships, whether in first person or through the entanglements experienced by their friends. Across engagements, marriages, affairs, casual sexual encounters and every nuance of romantic involvement in between, Ferrante explores complex themes like the ephemeral nature of love, the blight of domestic violence, contradictory jealousies, traditional and atypical gender relations and the convoluted ties that exist between love, money and happiness. There are so many different kinds of involvements between the characters as they turn from teenagers to adults, and I really appreciated that Ferrante did not produce idealized and unrealistic romances that would have felt inaccurate due to the difficult reality in which her characters grew up.

The importance given to language in the form of dialect versus ‘proper’ Italian. Italy has a plethora of dialects and accents through which you can identify someone as coming from a particular region or even city. In this second novel in the series, we see both Lila and Elena struggling to speak ‘proper’ Italian in an effort to elevate themselves above their origins and the other people of their neighborhood. In particular, Elena experiences living in another city in Italy, among mostly middle class people who naturally speak the ‘proper’ Italian she has to consciously fake. She even struggles to hide her Neapolitan accent so as not to be ridiculed for it. Ferrante doesn’t only identify the use or avoidance of dialect with social class and education, but also with morality, in a way that I found riveting. Some of the most violent and raw scenes in the novel occur with the characters yelling at each other in dialect, as if there was violence intrinsic in the local language itself. The dialect becomes part of the desperation and lack of opportunity experienced by the characters – something they can’t hide that brands them as excluded from the changed and advancements of an Italy that is modernising around them and without them.

What I Didn’t Like

The length. I love Ferrante’s style of writing and I’ve grown attached to her characters, so I thoroughly enjoyed the second book in this series and am looking forward to the next two. However, I think that the portions of Elena and Lila’s life that Ferrante covers in this installment could have been addressed with equal depth and complexity even if the book had been say 100 pages or so shorter. Certain segments dragged or seemed relatively unnecessary both to further character development or to move the plot forward.

Final Verdict

In the series’ second book, Ferrante poignantly explores Elena and Lila’s late teens and early twenties, as their destinies diverge and they struggle to create a meaningful adult life for themselves out of their bleak origins.

The Story of a New Name BBC Radio 4 adaptation

The programme will be broadcast Sunday 15th on January and Sun 22nd January.

From one of Italy’s most acclaimed authors, Elena Ferrante, the continuing story of Lila and Lena, two bright young girls who have grown up in the tough, rough streets of post war Naples.

Striving to make a better life for themselves, they work hard at school but Lila is stopped in her tracks when forced to give up her education and work for the family shoe making business. It’s not long before their worlds are pushed apart and Lila ends up marrying a local businessman and son of the murdered local loan shark Don Achille.

Written by Elena Ferrante
Dramatised by Timberlake Wertenbaker
Producer: Celia de Wolff
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.

Listen to the show

WHAT I’M READING – JANUARY

For anyone who hasn’t already delved into Ferrante’s series, I won’t spoil the plot; but the tale of friendship between two smart girls, trapped in the economics and misogyny of a poor neighborhood of Naples, is some of the best character-building I’ve ever read.  I preferred this volume to the first (more sex, more violence, and the women are becoming real adults), but its definitely part of an ongoing tale and requires starting at the beginning.

Things change, things stay the same: ‘The Story of a New Name’ by Elena Ferrante

Last year, I finally joined the Elena Ferrante fan club.  I thought ‘My Brilliant Friend’ completely lived up to its name, and I knew its sequel would have to be included in my 2016 reading.  Then, as tends to happen, I started to doubt myself.  Would I enjoy ‘The Story of a New Name’ as much as its predecessor?  Would my reading pleasure be diminished by the fact that, as the months moved on, I was forgetting the numerous character names that took me so long to get to grips with in the first volume?

I needn’t have worried; as always, Ferrante was one step ahead of me.  Not only was the writing so compelling that fears of being let down were immediately forgotten, but ‘The Story of a New Name’ politely assumes you have left a gap since finishing ‘My Brilliant Friend.’  At the start of this second book, Lenù, our narrator, receives a pile of notebooks from the infinitely attractive and enigmatic Lila.  Through summarising their contents, Lenù reminds us of all of the key events in the friendship so far.  Also, because these things are always complex, we get hints that Lila’s version is somehow better, more engaging, more powerful, more brilliant than Lenù’s telling.  The lives, the relationships and the central web of competition and companionship that made ‘Our Brilliant Friend’ so wonderful were all back and I felt as if I had never left the enthralling world of Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels.

For the rest of the story, it’s business as usual.  The endemic abuse within the friends’ tight-knit community touches them more closely than ever as they grow up from childish observers to women and wives.  Once again, it is Lila who appears to suffer the most, and yet who remains an aspirational figure, effortlessly talented and captivating.  Meanwhile, under the surface we’re given a contrasting narrative, one which deals with Lenù’s own attempts to forge a life for herself and escape into the middle-class milieu forever barred to her uneducated childhood friends.

In some ways, ‘The Story of a New Name’ was a comforting read; it gave me everything I was hoping for from an Elena Ferrante novel.  A part of this is that the novel contained reassuringly surprising twists and revelations.  Consistently powerful and unexpected, I’m so pleased to be only half way through Ferrante’s Neapolitan trilogy – with ‘Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay’ to look forward to in 2017!

Naples, 1950s, and a friendship

Book Review: The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

The Story of a New Name is the second book of the Neapolitan Novels.  It’s raw and brilliant, with a light that shines unblinking on its characters

Naples has always hung its washing to catch the air – it’s a city that knows its secrets … and so does Elena Ferrante.  In her novels she packs the unhidden into private lives and passes it on to us.

Street view in the old centre of Naples

The novel follows Lila, Elena and their peers through courtship, abuse, marriage, summers and work, and we see them now from two angles … from the thick of their lives in Naples, and from the refined distance of academia and college in Pisa.

On the one hand Elena brings her Naples, her life, directly to the table whilst in the other she elevates herself to where we might like to think we sit … apart, better.  Through her we circle the story as she shows us those forced to live with the unbearable while she strives through learning to achieve a purer life.

This might suggest a clear cut support for one side over the other but Elena Ferrante never goes this way.  Instead she gives us empathy and a sense of loss with writing so strong that it’s impossible to choose sides or to know what’s next.  We’re taken deep into friendships, shown brutal truths and left with questions about ourselves.

The two characters that attract the spotlight are Elena and Lila, but there is another that never leaves the pages: Naples.

There are no long physical descriptions of the city instead we are taken straight to its heart, to its crowded core, and shown why it beats like it does.  We see courage, pain, brilliance, ignorance, love and corruption as they entwine in the struggle for the heights of Vomero or the wealthy life of Chiaia.

This is how Naples today still feels – restless, watchful, intense and alive.

Perhaps you are undecided as to whether or not to read these Neapolitan novels … if so, here are three reasons that I hope will persuade you:  first – there is the pleasure of the writing and the power of the tale; second – there is the chance to be led right inside the heart of Naples; and third – there is provocation, the kind that makes you think, such as this for instance from near the end of the novel (page 466):

“…she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.”

Book four in the series, The Story of the Lost Child, has just been published.

Currently Reading

The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante – This is Book #2 in the Neapolitan Series, continuing the story and the friendship of Lila and Elena.  Lila is newly married and finds herself essentially a prisoner of her husband.  He doesn’t like her going out or working or interacting with any men.  Elena remains in school, furthering her education.  The girls vacation together on the coast for the summer, where Lila falls into a relationship with Elena’s crush, cheating on her husband.  Elena herself loses her virginity that summer, in an unlikely way.  As in the first novel, we see the strength of female friendship, the blatant misogyny that all the women in the story must suffer, and the hope that education gives them.  Excited for Book #3!

The Story of a New Name (The Neapolitan Novels #2) by Elena Ferrante

When we get to the end of the second book in Ferrante’s quartet of novels, we think we see the genesis of that quartet: a twenty-day writing exercise that took the angst out of university graduation for Elena Greco, also called Lenù. Although I struggled through this volume, listening to the voices of teens talking about their confusion and noting their lack of confidence while they strode boldly ahead, all was forgiven in the last one hundred pages.

The girls are now women, having earned a few hard-won truths they will use to the end of their days. The first lessons last longest. Lina and Lenù, the names barely distinguishable when heard, have discovered that in early 1960’s Italy, it is still a man’s world. Lina is unafraid and almost preternaturally resistant to control. She is curious, and furious. She is still the one we look to when we want to know what comes next. Her refusal to take what’s coming to her makes everyone, paradoxically, jealous of her.

Lenù is soft and bosomy and tries very hard to rustle up indignation about world peace, about Lina taking a lover (Lenù’s lover), about her prospects after university. She wants tofeel things as deeply and as ardently as Lina. When she sees Lina again at the end of this novel, we can tell she knows she will never reach those depths. And perhaps it is just as well. One must have the whole package if one is to survive those depths: a fierce, innovative intelligence and an unrelenting determination to survive on one’s own terms.

Put in the context of world literature, this series is developing into something remarkable. The voices of women in a man’s world are so seldom heard without interference or distortion. While that may not be true today, it was certainly true in 1960’s Italy, and to have even a glimpse behind the veil is something precious. But this is fiction, you protest. Ah, nobody could make a world so complete, so filled with recognizable motivations, were it not at least close to a kind of universal truth.

Besides that, there is the style of the work: it is so accessible, so female, so filled with things men would never say, never contemplate saying. We all grew up reading the writing of men, so we can consider ourselves experts. This work is different. It dwells on minutiae. The aspects of characters are raked over, head to foot, for what they reveal about that character’s state of mind and intention. The story slows while we contemplate their dilemmas, and like women everywhere, put ourselves in their place. It is a kind of soap opera, but the very best kind. It is the kind that teaches us something about how the world works and how other have dealt with circumstances we might encounter.

But it may be the language that is the most remarkable thing of all. Throughout the novel we hear Lenù talking about dialect versus Italian, implying that there are things that can be said in Italian that can not be conveyed in dialect. Well, it seems that there is also a kind of alchemy here that relates to the language Ferrante uses that gives us direct access to the hearts and minds of two women on the cusp of adulthood. Other people have tried to do this, but Ferrante has succeeded beyond the borders of her own country, beyond her generation, beyond her sex. When Elena says she went to Lina at the end of the novel to “show her what she had lost and what I had won,” we wait for it…wait for the penny to drop…

“[Lina] was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was as full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other very so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.”

Ferrante deserves the attention she has had from this series of novels. It is world-class literature that deserves a place in the pantheon. I am looking forward to Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay.

For those following this series, or those put off by the covers, please note there is a debate raging in literary circles about just this topic: The Atlantic magazine contributor Emily Harnett wrote a piece explaining the publisher’s point in deciding on the covers as they are.