You are poor, bright, and beautiful, but you never feel quite bright or beautiful enough because your best friend is brighter and beautifuller.
Your best friend has never forgiven you for being the first to experience menarche or being allowed to progress beyond primary school. Ever since, she’s been competing with you over just about everything.
You feel an unnameable, shameful aversion to your mother, whose limping gait you are afraid you will come to adopt.
Naples is trash, and you grow up to realise that you live amongst trash.
You watch helplessly as your little sister falls into the arms of a wicked man. This would never have happened if you didn’t live in Naples.
Your brother grows up to disappoint.
Your son grows up to disappoint.
Your father is fine but inconsequential.
You speak in Italian when you want to sound smooth and superior.
You speak in dialect when you want to connect with your childhood friends of yore, but every word sounds false.
You long to escape to the seaside.
You escape to the seaside, but you fail to escape your neuroses.
A gentle boy who once loved you is now a pitiless factory owner.
Everyone agrees that your best friend is a wicked, but remarkable woman. Only you know just how wicked.
You know your best friend has stopped caring for you, indeed if she ever did, even though she makes you sandwiches every day and promises to buy you schoolbooks.
You buy the rumour that your best friend is able to prevent pregnancy through sheer force of will.
You have determined to cut your best friend off before she wreaks the same terrible vengeance on you.
You viciously destroy a little girl’s doll without understanding why. You suppose you’re just a disgusting human being who has an almost maternal impulse towards destruction.
Everyone looks at you in judgment and scorn. You know, in that moment, that they can tell you are a wretched and repulsive creature who grew up poor.
Your best friend sends you into a shame spiral when she says that she hates one of the petit bourgeois you’ve been trying so hard to impress.
For a brief couple of months, you fantasise constantly about your best friend murdering a factory owner.
You comfort yourself with the knowledge that you can always cut ties with your best friend, but she won’t stop telephoning you to talk about herself.
You try to be political, but you have the sneaking suspicion that you’re not very good at it.
You speak of the wage gap, as a tease. Your male friend mumbles quellingly that private ownership of the means of production should be abolished.
There are Communists talking at you, and you are simultaneously repulsed and ashamed.
You resent your husband for being the least interesting member of his mildly famous, left-leaning literati family.
Your husband resents you for becoming a literary sensation.
You work – you teach, you write, you translate – but all such manner of work cannot conceal the terrible violence, or the emptiness, in your heart.
Someone cruelly tells you your thought is superficial and you speak in clichés.
You know, in your heart, that you lack the imagination to make prose sing.
Oh, but that your best friend had been a writer! You would still have been a failure, but her reflected brilliance would have made you a glorious failure.
You can never escape the curse of your old neighbourhood, where the fascists have taken over like a noxious gas.
Sex underwhelms you. The closest you ever get to orgasmic ecstasy is the sensation you feel when your newborn daughter is first put in your arms.
You are relieved when your husband announces he is leaving you, but this relief is too inconsequential to speak of.
You are very happy, but there is a fearful trembling in the ground and in your heart.
You have turned to stone. A hairline crack runs along your entire length from crown to toe.
Your feet have turned to liquid, and you are melting onto the kitchen floor.
Tags: books, elena ferrante, how to tell what novel you’re in, li sian goh
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*insert Amelie melting gif here*
still havent figured that out yet.
Oh man I am so obsessed with Elena Ferrante right now. I felt so transported by her Naples series–it was like reading a fantasy novel with all the little world-building details only it was just a very fully-realized description of a real place. I can’t wait to read the last book.
I’m spacing out the last book, reading 30-50 pages a day. I don’t want it to end!
I doubt I will have the self-control to do that once I hunker down to read it this weekend.
I’m holding off until I finish a couple of time-intensive projects, because once I start, I will not sleep or accomplish anything until it’s done. And I suppose compiling the video for my parent’s golden anniversary trumps reading a book, even a Ferrante book.
“You viciously destroy a little girl’s doll without understanding why. You suppose you’re just a disgusting human being who has an almost maternal impulse towards destruction.” I loved this!
Not liking Ferrante is one of those things that I feel like I can’t admit in public, so I’m just going to say it here and quickly sidle off. This article was great though.
So, having never heard of this author before and never read the books, am I safe to presume the novels are thinly-veiled tell-alls about Ferrante’s frenemy?
Nobody knows because nobody knows who Ferrante is!
Except for the frenemy who recognizes herself in the descriptions of the much-loathed best friend…
“I bet you think this book is abooouuut youuu~.”
Honestly, there is a part of me that would LOVE for there to be a real-life frenemy that was the impetus behind writing this series. I am so fascinated by their relationship within the novels that it is hard for me to not want it to be a real thing. It would fit into the novels so well. It would be so amazing.
WE DON’T KNOW! She writes under a pseudonym & never does author events (sometimes – rarely – email interviews) and no one knows who she is but everyone wants to know and some RIDICULOUS INSANE people speculate she’s a male writer, but only because they are IDIOTS because never in the course of human history has anyone written about being a female through all stages of life with more incisive accuracy.
You’ve loved the bright boy from elementary school for decades, and let him ruin your life even though he’s a liar, a cheater, and will always love your best friend anyway. http://fuckninosarratore.tumblr.com/
This is the tumblr I never knew I needed in my life, but boy do I! Seriously. Fuck that guy.
Nino is the WORST.
I just bought the first one, and I’m going to Italy in a few weeks and it’s going to be beautifully synchronous.
What a delight to find this here! I, too, loved the line “an almost maternal impulse towards destruction.” Wonderful!
I’m glad there were no obvious allusions here to Days of Abandonment because man, that was the most brutal thing I’ve ever read, and I have still not recovered.
That was a seriously difficult read. There was a vague apocolyptic feel to it, at the same time I kept saying to myself “I can leave here anytime, right?”
I had thought it was a trilogy and about halfway through the last one when I realized it was not going to wrap up I had this scary idea that there might actually be three or four or MORE of these books. I am glad this will be the last one.It is just all too traumatic, though excetionally well-written.
i have GOT to read these books!
Nino is the WORST.
Just today, I finished listening to the first book on tape (I know, I know, but I need to listen to something on the walk to and from work)–I mostly loved it throughout, but that last chapter, that last line–wow!! I didn’t know how the Nino story develops, btw, but I’m not surprised that that self-absorbed Deep Guy turns into a total shit (mostly because this has happened to me so many times). On to the next one!
Her prose is so beautiful, it amazes me that it is a translation. But everyone is always so unhappy, nothing ever turns out as hoped, so much violence and poverty. These are not happy-making books (I read most of the second one while home sick one day and I do think it made me feel WORSE), but I am excited to read this last one. If only to be done of them.
It’s no surprise that Alice Sebold loves it then. I read the Lovely Bones right before my very first period and bawled my damn eyes out through 3/4 of the book
I heard about Elena Ferrante yesterday and thought, “Women and language? This is the most Toast book series I’ve ever heard of.” Gonna go read them as soon as I can.
The translator, Ann Goldstein, is an editor at the New Yorker. She got handed an Italian manuscript in the 90s because she was the only one in the office who could read Italian; she translated it for the New Yorker and has continued translating ever since because she enjoys it. As a person currently studying translation and interpretation (very expensively) this boggles my mind. Usually it takes a lot more than having language skills and being in the right place at the right time to launch a translating career! I hope I can be so lucky.
Err I wish you'd mentioned "spoiler alert," because the first quote I saw on that page is a telling one from Book Four, which just came out…
So this is basically a plot summary, just not in linear order.
So this is basically a plot summary, just not in linear order.
I am still waiting for it to turn out that your best friend has vanished because you might have skinned her alive so that you can wear her and never, ever be apart again.
BF4ever!