Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet

This November, although I was physically in Delhi, I spent most of the month mentally wandering the streets of Naples. I was immersed in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, and I’m still not sure how to fully describe the experience. The four books, spanning 1700 odd pages was one of the most powerful literary encounters I’ve had this year. It is little wonder that the series was voted as the greatest work of fiction of the 21^st century by the NYT.

The books begin as a story of two girls growing up in a poor neighborhood of Naples in the mid-40s and from there it sprawls into a complex, meandering exploration of the ferocity of female friendships, class, violence, motherhood, desire, status. the tediousness of marriage and so much more. I wonder if any work of literature packs so much about the female psyche and the idea of womanhood.

Interspersed in the narrative is also the changing economic and political climate of Italy from the 50s to the early oughts.

We lived in a world in which children and adults were often wounded, blood flowed from the wounds, they festered, and sometimes people died. One of the daughters of Signora Assunta, the fruit and vegetable seller, had stepped on a nail and died of tetanus. Signora Spagnuolo’s youngest child had died of croup. A cousin of mine, at the age of twenty, had gone one morning to move some rubble and that night was dead, crushed, the blood pouring out of his ears and mouth. My mother’s father had been killed when he fell from a scaffolding at a building site. The father of Signor Peluso was missing an arm, the lathe had caught him unawares. The sister of Giuseppina, Signor Peluso’s wife, had died of tuberculosis at twenty-two. The oldest son of Don Achille—I had never seen him, and yet I seemed to remember him—had gone to war and died twice: drowned in the Pacific Ocean, then eaten by sharks. The entire Melchiorre family had died clinging to each other, screaming with fear, in a bombardment. Old Signorina Clorinda had died inhaling gas instead of air. Giannino, who was in fourth grade when we were in first, had died one day because he had come across a bomb and touched it. Luigina, with whom we had played in the courtyard, or maybe not, she was only a name, had died of typhus. Our world was like that, full of words that killed: croup, tetanus, typhus, gas, war, lathe, rubble, work, bombardment, bomb, tuberculosis, infection. With these words and those years I bring back the many fears that accompanied me all my life.

Lenu comparing a lover who read with one who didnt:

We walked for a long time. We kissed, we embraced on the Lungarno, I asked him, half serious, half joking, if he wanted to sneak into my room. He shook his head, he went back to kissing me passionately. There were entire libraries separating him and Antonio, but they were similar.

‘There were entire libraries separating him and Antonio’.

On the destructive pull of desire :

Although I now wrote about women’s autonomy and discussed it everywhere, I didn’t know how to live without his body, his voice, his intelligence. It was terrible to confess it, but I still wanted him, I loved him more than my own daughters. At the idea of hurting him and of no longer seeing him I withered painfully, the free and educated woman lost her petals, separated from the woman-mother, and the woman-mother was disconnected from the woman-lover, and the woman-lover from the furious whore, and we all seemed on the point of flying off in different directions.

On the magnetic allure of Lila despite her unremarkable and miserable life:

She possessed intelligence and didn’t put it to use but, rather, wasted it, like a great lady for whom all the riches of the world are merely a sign of vulgarity. That was the fact that must have beguiled Nino: the gratuitousness of Lila’s intelligence. She stood out among so many because she, naturally, did not submit to any training, to any use, or to any purpose. All of us had submitted and that submission had—through trials, failures, successes—reduced us. Only Lila, nothing and no one seemed to reduce her. Rather, even if over the years she became as stupid and intractable as anyone, the qualities that we had attributed to her would remain intact, maybe they would be magnified. Even when we hated her we ended by respecting her and fearing her. It didn’t surprise me, when I thought about it, that Nadia, although she had met Lila only a few times, detested her and wanted to hurt her.

The entire quartet has been adapted by HBO and has received rave reviews too. I probably will keep it for next year.

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