“Nowhere is it written that you can’t do it.”
― Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend
Drama, plot and feminism. If these three words make you curious, then you should try to read ``The Neapolitan Tetralogy`` by Elena Ferrante, a biography of a girl who tried her best to follow her dreams and succeeded. There are four volumes: "My Brilliant Friend", "The Story of a New Name", "Those who leave and those who stay" and "The Story of the Lost Child".
The action takes place in Italy and to be exact, most of it happens in Napoli, this city being where Elena was born and raised. Napoli is known to be magnificent, with a lot of history within the walls of its buildings. When describing the city, Elena mentioned the beautiful parts, but didn’t insist on them. She wrote about life in the suburbs of Napoli, about the things that are never told about this city, like the poverty, mafia, the dangers, the fear of being murdered and many other negative things. Her honesty about this city made us more interested in learning more about the true life of Napoli. And what better opportunity than reading books written by a Neapolitan author?
She and many other kids from the neighbourhood had their childhood affected by the violent events that took place there. At first, Elena and her best friend, Lila, were around the young age of 7, and their main occupation was studying. They went to school, got good grades and had a passion for reading.
We always see them discussing the book "Little women" by Louisa May Alcott. But their friendship was in fact toxic, continuing to be like that even when the two were adults. Lila was very smart, but had no ambition and no intention of using her intelligence or having a career, her thirst for money making her marry at a very young age. Elena was also very smart and unlike Lila, she wanted to have a career, to make money herself and to be very well read. But there was also jealousy between the two best friends, each of them wanting to be better than the other.
Elena was ambitious, and therefore after graduating school in the neighbourhood, she went to high school, and after high school she was accepted at university. She studied Latin, Greek and Italian. Lila stopped going to school after fourth grade, got married at sixteen, and after a few years of marriage she got pregnant with her son, Genarro. Of course, her marriage failed due to the age gap and thirst for power and money. In fact, Lila actually cheated on her husband with Nino, the boy Elena was in love with, an action that makes us understand better the rivalry between the two girls.
Lila wanted the life Elena had, and Elena didn’t realise that. Despite all the bad things Lila had done to her friend, their relationship resisted for many years.
Besides studying, Elena also had a social life. She went out with her friends for pizza, went to parties, and even had boyfriends. She got married with a colleague from university, got a divorce then her feelings for Nino, her first love, reappeared and had a relationship with him, but not for too long, and had three daughters : Adele, Elsa and Immacollata. So Elena remains a single mom, but becomes a successful author.
She returns to Napoli, close to the neighbourhood to be closer to her family and her best friend. Lila remarried and had a daughter, whom Elena loved like her own. In the last volume, we watch the girls grow. Unfortunately, Lila’s daughter disappears and is never found. There were theories told by neighbours that the little girl got lost and was hit by a truck. Everyone was devastated by the tragedy.
By naming the last volume "The Story of the Lost Child", Elena wanted to conserve the memory of Lila’s lost daughter. In the final chapters of the last volume, Elena and Lila were sixty years old. The author receives a phone call from Genarro that Lila has gone missing, that she took all her items and cut herself from the photographs. Elena panicked at first, but remembered that Lila once told her that one day she just wants to disappear and to leave no evidence that she existed.
In conclusion, I invite you to read "The Neapolitan Tetralogy". Describing the parallel of two best friends, Elena Ferrante manages to write about her life, including all the hard times and barriers, her life uncensored, which not many writers like to include in their books.
Mihaela Răduț
Comments