We love lists for the semblance of order it gives to our messy lives. When The New York Times came up with the 100 Best Books of the 21st century, we pored over it, happily rediscovering gems, mourning a missing favourite and questioning what we thought was a dodgy inclusion. The top three spots are claimed by women —Hilary Mantel’s extraordinary reimagining of Thomas Cromwell’s life, Wolf Hall, was in the third spot, Isabel Wilkerson’s magnificently detailed account of the great migration of Black Americans, The Warmth of Other Suns, came in second and Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, the first of her Neapolitan quartet, took the top spot.
Story of two girls
Ferrante has two other entries in the list with The Days of Abandonment at 92 and the heart-breaking conclusion to the Neapolitan quartet, The Story of the Lost Child, at 80. My Brilliant Friend, translated by Ann Goldstein, was published in English in 2012, a year after it was originally published in Italian. It was followed by The Story of a New Name and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay.
The novel tells the story of two girls, Lenù and Lila, growing up in a tough neighbourhood in Naples in the 1950s. The first book follows the girls from the age of six and ends with a poignant cliff hanger at Lila’s wedding at the age of 16. My Brilliant Friend begins in 2010 with a 66-year-old Lenù, getting a telephone call saying Lila has literally vanished without a trace. Nothing of her remains, from her clothes, shoes, books and keepsakes to cutting herself out of every photograph.
Lenù realises this is what Lila wanted to do, had spoken of doing — erasing herself and the life she left behind. Angry, Lenù decides to write everything she remembers about Lila, which she does in four brilliant books, tracing the two girls’ lives, intertwined with the history and politics of the region.
The books are intensely confined to the impoverished neighbourhood in Naples and simultaneously also the larger world, encompassing Italy and the rest. There is the trauma of World War II, the rise of communism and radical feminism, crime, Camorra, drugs and computers as well as the softer cultural markers from photo romances and Lambrettas to Jackie Kennedy’s iconic style.
Different paths
Circumstances separate the girls, with Lenù going on to study and becoming an author, and Lila, who is frighteningly intelligent, giving up school as her parents do not think it necessary to educate her, helping her mother at home and her father in the shoe shop.
Even in the shoe shop, Lila, who after reading Little Women, decided to become a novelist to become rich and wrote a novel, The Blue Fairy, designs beautiful shoes. Though her father does not wish to make shoes — everyone prefers factory-made shoes, he says, Lila and her brother make a pair of shoes, which is the cause of a great deal of heartache.
Though the cast of characters seem overwhelmingly large at the outset, over the course of the four novels, they become people we know very well. There is a universality of that neighbourhood where we can all recognise the uncles, aunties, bad boys and girls, the clever ones destined to succeed and the others just as surely bound to fail.
Church at the centre
The neighbourhood in Naples can easily be in Thrissur, with the church as the centre of all important transactions both material and spiritual. The care with which girls have to protect their honour and reputation, the speed with which offence is taken and violence in speech and action meted out to imagined and real slights, are all so depressingly familiar. However, in the midst of the poverty, deprivation, misogyny and casual violence, there is hope most of all in the relationship of Lenù and Lila. Though as Lenù helps Lila dress for her wedding in a heartbreakingly beautiful scene, Lila calls Lenù “her brilliant friend”, Lila is also Lenù’s brilliant friend, “dissolving margins” and all.
Lenù portrays herself as a diligent worker, while Lila is the one with the quicksilver mind. Calling her Lila while the rest of the neighbourhood calls her Lina (her name is Raffaella) shows that Lenù sees Lila differently from the neighbourhood, who look upon her as a troublemaker and one who needs to be subdued.
Distinct voice
Lenù has a distinct voice as a chronicler telling her story, and the story of all in the neighbourhood along with Lila’s. In a way their story is the story of the neighbourhood, singular and universal. There is a fearful symmetry in the Neapolitan Quartet. Lila drops Lenù’s doll into the cellar grate, which the six-year-old Lenù is convinced is haunted by the fearsome Don Achille, and prompts Lenù to drop Lila’s doll as well. This sets the tone of the relationship between the two girls — bound by love, competition and validation. In the epilogue of The Story of the Lost Child, Lenù gets a package containing the two dolls completing the circle.
My Brilliant Friend has been made into a successful series— the fourth and final season based on The Story of the Lost Child is coming out on September 9. For a work of autofiction, the fact that Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym is one of never-ending fascination for pundits and plebs alike. In an age of book tours, signings and authors taking to social media to engage with their readers, Ferrante’s decision to remain anonymous is bewildering and bedazzling.
Unlike Monk’s assumption of a pseudonym in Percival Everett’s Erasure, which incidentally has come in at 20 in the list, Ferrante has said in an interview, “books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.”
Published - August 08, 2024 08:30 am IST
