Girls, Girls, Girls

Elena Ferrante: The Story of a New Name

Part 2 of Ferrante's quadrology (as for my review of Part 1)... pure rock'n roll it is. Spoilers ahead.

The story begins at Lila's wedding with Stefano Carraci, right where the first book ended. Already during their honeymoon, Lila and Stefano descend into a cycle of provokation and abuse. After a while, however, Lila learns how to manage her violent husband and seems to be settling (or resigning) into the new circumstances. She gets pregnant but loses the baby.
Elena and her neighborhood boyfriend Antonio Cappucio break up, apparently due to to his upcoming military service but mostly due to Elena's continuing affection for Nino Sarratore. At school, Elena is being intellectually promoted by her teacher, Professor Gailani, whose daughter is dating Nino. Elena and Lila have their first longer term fallout after a party at Professor Gailani's place, where Elena moves elegantly in new intellectual circles, while Lila feels awkwardly left out (and jealous of Elena).
They reconcile and decide to spend summer holidays together in Ischia. The stay proves to be a decisive turning point for the two womens' story. Elena's secret intention behind the holidays is to be close to Nino, who is also in Ischia. In what is one of the most gripping parts of the novel, we see the slow unfolding of an affair between Lila and Nino. Elena, visibly under shock, reacts by spending a night with Nino's father. Another prolonged break ensues between Elena and Lila.
Elena gets accepted into university at Pisa, while Nino and Lila continue their affair. After running away from Stefano for a couple of weeks, Nino breaks up with Lila and she returns, pregnant, to her husband. In the coming years, Lila is all focused on raising her son Gennaro. At the same time, Stefano begins an affair with the sales clerk in his family's grocery.
The story ends with Lila running off with her long-term admirer, Enzo Scanno, and her son Gennaro. In order to make ends meet, Lila takes up work in a meat factory. While Lila and Enzo are not romantically involved, they seem to form an increasingly deep bond, united in studying together late at night. In the end of the story, Elena gets her first novel published, starting a promising literary career.

"My brilliant friend" was already a great read, but, in retrospect, it was no comparison to the second part of the Naples novels. The story really picks up pace, especially after Lila and Nino begin their affair in Ischia. As said before, Ferrante provides one of the best depictions of friendship and the lives of young adult's in all their complexity. The innocence that was still somehow there in Part 1 is lost. To use a concept introduced by Lila, the margins of the characters are "dissolving" in a microcosm of adultery, rivalry and violence. All this takes place against the contemporary social habits and politics of 1960's Italy which Ferrante so brilliantly depicts ... overall, nothing less than amazing. 

Random movie reference:
Difficult one. The whole dynamic between Elena, Lila and Nino kind of remotely reminded me of Noodles, Max and Deborah in Once Upon a Time in America. 

Favorite quotes: 
"I understood only later that I can be quietly unhappy, because I am incapable of violent reactions. I fear them, I prefer to be still, cultivating resentment. Not Lila." (Elena)

"I got low marks in chemistry, art history, and philosophy, and my nerves were so frayed that right after the last bad grade I burst into tears in front of everyone. It was a horrible moment: I felt the horror and pleasure of losing myself, the fear and the pride in going off the rails." (Elena)

"I started to borrow novels from the circulating library, and read one after the other. But in the long run they didn't help. They presented intense lives, profound conversations, a phantom reality more appealing than my real life." (Elena)

"Even if you are better than me, even if you know more things, don't leave me." (Lina to Elena)

"She had felt the need to humiliate me in order to better endure her own humiliation." (Elena about Lina after the party at Professor Gailani's which led to their fall-out)

"She was born like that, she could have learned the art of engraving merely by studying the gestures of a goldsmith, and then be able to work the gold better than he." (Elena about Lina)

"Neither she nor I would ever have him. But both of us, for the entire time of the vacation, could gain his attention, she as the object of a passion with no future, I as the wise counselor who kept under control both his folly and hers. I consoled myself with that hypothesis of centrality." (Elena about Lila when Lila's affair with Nino is about to begin)

"The more Lina is surrounded by affection and admiration, the crueler she can become. She's always been like that." (Elena to Nino about Lila)

"Naples had been very useful in Pisa, but Pisa was no use in Naples, it was an obstacle. Good manners, cultured voice and appearance, the crush in my head and on my tongue of what I had learned in books were all immediate signs of weakness that made me a secure prey, one of those who don't struggle." (Elena about her return to Naples)

"I understood that ... I had made the whole journey mainly to show her what she had lost and what I had won. But... 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 so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other." (Elena about her meeting with Lina in the end of the book)

Männer

David Szalay: All That Man Is

Made the Man Booker shortlist this year. A good read. Szalay presents short stories that revolve around men at different stages of their lives:

• Two young Brits travelling through Europe on interrail. While in Prague, one of them ends spending the night with the married owner of the apartment they are staying at.
• A young unemployed Frenchman on holidays in Cyprus where he meets meets a massively obese British mother and daughter couple.
• A Hungarian former soldier who falls in love with the prostitute he protects in London.
• A Belgian professor on a road trip through Germany. His young girlfriend has just discovered she is pregnant.
• A Danish journalist who visits his country's minister of defense on holidays in Spain to confront the latter about an affair he has had.
• A married British real estate developer who, while on a business trip to Switzerland, is being hit on by a younger colleague of his.
• A British pensioner who has emigrated to Croatia and whose life is thrown off balance when his only friend in town begins an affair with a younger woman.
• A Russian oligarch who is at the brink of financial ruin and whose wife is divorcing him. The oligarch heads for his yacht in the Aegean sea to commit suicide.
• A British retired civil servant at his holiday home in Italy who is looking back at his life while recovering from heart surgery and an accident .

Overall, definitely nice to read. Szalay's realism and attention to detail in describing the various scenarios is captivating. It is also fascinating to follow the nine men at different stages of their lives. Moreover, Szalay has written a truly European novel, whose settings span the entire continent. Still, while the short stories are really great, the book as whole didn't entirely click with me. One of the reasons may be that it remains unclear whether the book works as a novel or is better read as a loose collection of short stories.

Random movie association:

Still working on that one. But if the book needed a soundtrack, Grönemeyer would have provided it.

Favorite quotes:

"As he had been intent on enacting his own long-standing fantasy, so she had been enacting a fantasy of her own, in no way less elfish. Except that she was nineteen or twenty, and still entitled to selfishness- not having learned yet, how easily and lastingly people are hurt- and he was more than ten years older and ought to have understood that by now."

"That's the thing about fate, the way you only understand what your fate is when it's too late to do anything about it. That's why it is your fate- it's too late to do anything about it."

'Tell me ... have you got a hobby?' 'A hobby? ... No' He has never had a hobby- in his Who's Who entry, he had listed 'interests' as 'wealth' and 'power'.

"Slowly they made their peace with the place, until they felt a kind of love for it. You learn to love what's there, not what's not there. How can you live, otherwise?"

"Amemus eterna et non peritura. Amemus- Let us love. Eterna- that which is eternal. Et non peritura- and not that which is transient." 

Girls just Wanna Have Fun

Elena Ferrante: My Brilliant Friend

This is the first part of Elena Ferrante's "quadrology" about the friendship between two Napolitan girls which spans multiple decades. A great, great read, and one of the best coming off age stories/ "Bildungsromane" I have read in recent years. I understand where the international hype around those books is coming from...

The story begins with the disappearance of Lila Cerullo, who has apparently realized her long-standing desire to escape from her life without leaving a trace. This event inspires her friend Elena Greco to tell "their" story, going back to the Napolitan neighborhood they both grew up in the 1950s.
Both girls come from simple backgrounds. Lila is the daughter of a shoemaker, Elena of a porter at the city hall. They start to bond when attending primary school. Even though Lila is the academically more successful, it is only Elena who gets to continue her education; Lila learns how to make shoes in her father and brother's shop. Lila gets increasingly sucked into the world of shoe-making, hoping to get rich through hand-made shoes designed by her and her brother Rino. At the same time, she keeps on studying with Elena, which, due to the ever-present rivalry between the two girls, pushes the latter to become an increasingly successful student.  
The love lives of the two girls become increasingly important in the later parts of the book. Marcello Solara, whose family owns a bar-pastry shop and maintains ties to organized crime, starts to pursue Lila, much to her disliking. In order to escape from Marcello, Lila turns towards Stefano Carraci, son of the late godfather of the neighborhood, but now seemingly making a decent living in his family's grocery store. Elena, in turn, is in love with the Nino, the son of Donato Sarratore, a railroad worker, poet and womanizer. Elena is especially attracted by Nino's intellectual side and the fact that he seems to have developed beyond the confines of their neighborhood. However, apart from a kiss during a holiday, nothing happens between the two. Ever jealous of Lila and her relationship with Stefano, Elena takes Antonio Cappucio, a local mechanic, as her boyfriend. Without providing too many spoilers, the story finishes with Lila and Stefano's wedding, which turns out to run different than anticipated....

The book provides a colorful depiction of the Napolitan neighborhood the two girls grow up in, to include the various families that live in it. It also offers great insights into the social conventions of the time, with for instance Lila only being able to escape the advances of Marcello Solara by getting married to somebody else. Admittedly, I am no expert on female friendships. Still, Ferrante delivers what is probably one of the most interesting depictions of friendship- in all its complexity- I have ever read. Lila and Elena are not only best friends for each other, but also rivals, role models (especially Lila to Elena) and surrogates allowing one to live the life she herself cannot have (Elena to Lina). Nothing less than impressive.

Random movie reference:
Something from the godfather. Raising the question of whether we can ever get over our heritage..

Favorite quotes:
"The thing was happening to her that she later called dissolving margins. It was- she told me- as if, on the night of a full moon over the sea, the intense black mass of a storm advanced across the sky, swallowing every light, eroding the circumference of the moon's circle and disfiguring the shining disk, reducing it to its true nature of rough insensate material." (Elena about Lila's idea of "dissolving margins")

"I was afraid of what was happening to her, good or bad in my absence. It was an old fear, a fear that has never left me: the fear that, in losing pieces of her life, mine lost intensity and importance." (Elena about Lina not writing during her holidays)

"Out of vanity he would hurt anyone and never feel responsible. Since he is convinced that he makes everybody happy, he thinks that everything is forgiven him." (Nino about her father).

"Nino has something that's eating him inside, like Lila, and it's a gift and a suffering; they aren't content, they never give in, they fear what is happening around them." (Elena about Nino)

"The beauty of mind that Cerullo had from childhood didn't find an outlet, Greco, and it has all ended up in her face, in her breasts, in her thighs, in her ass, places where it soon fades and it will be as if she had never had it." (Their former teacher about Lila)

"But now I felt good and I wanted to feel even better. When Antonio, guessing that I was in the right mood, asked if I wanted to be his girlfriend, I said yes right away, even though I loved someone else, even if I felt for him nothing but some friendliness." (Elena about her boyfriend Antonio)

"It had been very energizing to win praise from those who seemed to me better ... taking sides against those who seemed to me worse ... and yet to behave toward the adversaries in such a way as not to lose their friendship and respect." (Elena)

"I thought how contradictory she was, without realizing it, with her rages, with those imperious gestures. She hadn't wanted me to go to school, but now that I was going to school she considered me better than the boys I had grown up with, and she understood, as I myself did, that my place was not among them." (Elena about Lina)

"Yes, you're right, I don't know what I am and what I really want, I use you and then I throw you away, but it's not my fault, I feel half and half, forgive me." (Elena about her feelings towards Antonio)

Life's a Bitch

Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life

My first “summer read” of this year. Man Booker finalist and one of the most discussed novels of 2015. 700 pages long, and, every page worth the read.

A coming of age story that spans several decades. It starts with four college friends who have just come to New York to begin their professional lives. Jude, a litigator, Malcolm, an architect, Willem, an actor, and J.B., an artist. Two colored (J.B. and Malcolm), two white (Willem and Jude). Two from a well-off family background (J.B. and Malcolm), one from a poor family (Willem), one with no family at all (Jude).  One is openly gay (J.B.), one ambiguous in his orientation (Malcolm), one apparently very much a women’s’ man (Willem) and one not associated with any kind of relation (Jude). In the coming years, all four become fabulously successful, travel the world, attend glamorous parties, move into beautiful apartments etc.

This is the outer setting against which Yanagihara tells the story of the central character, Jude St. Francis. Step by step, the novel reveals the dark tale of the physical and sexual abuse Jude endured during his childhood and teenage days. An orphan, he was at first abused in the monastery that took him in, then ran off with a monk who prostituted him, landed in a state institution where the abuse continued, worked as a male prostitute along highways, before ending up in the captivity of a sadistic psychiatrist who almost kills him and leaves his legs permanently disabled. When entering college, Jude leaves behind this old life, assuming an almost impenetrable, controlled outer self. While close to his friends, Jude doesn’t give away much about his past to them and, as a kind of coping mechanism, cuts himself on a regular, sometimes excessive, basis. Throughout the novel, Jude witnesses recurrent episodes of intense pain, with his legs finally being amputated. He enters a violent relationship with another man, ultimately leading Jude to attempt to commit suicide. There are, however, also bright spots throughout the story. Andy, his doctor, takes loving care of Jude’s fragile physical condition. Jude’s friendship with Willem is ever deepening and becomes the dominant theme in the second half of the novel. Jude finds a family after he is adopted by Harold, his old Harvard Law professor.

I won’t give away anything about the book's last third or the ending, given how powerful it is. It virtually smacks the reader in the face. This is a very dark, but at the same time beautiful tale of friendship and love. The story has a kind of fairy tale like feel. It for instance does not give any references to real world events. It is set in New York over several decades, but it is never mentioned who is president; there is no discernable change in societal attitudes towards gay people etc. The glamorous setting contrasts nicely with the dark story of Jude. The book touches on eternal themes, such as friendship, love, self-loathing, and the attempt to conceal one’s own weaknesses. The most moving parts are probably about Jude’s almost super-human attempts at self-control, his shame for what happened him in the past, his friends attempting to save him by attempting getting through to him. Overall, probably one of the most powerful novel I have read since Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. Yes, the drama in it and the almost complete lack of irony may sometimes feel borderline kitsch and there is perhaps a bit too much "lifestyle porn". Fuck it, this book remains simply a heart-warming piece. Best read of the year (and perhaps even the last years) up to now.

Next up on the list of modern day (potential) classics: Elena Ferrante's "My brilliant friend" and Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom".

Random movie/ music reference:

I could have gone for Hey Jude, but there was a guy playing Radiohead when I read this book in a riverside bar in central Portugal…

Favorite quotes:

"You understood that proof of your friendship lay in keeping your distance, in accepting what was told you, in turning and walking away when the door was shut in your face instead of trying to force it open again."

"Friendship, companionship: it so often defied logic, so often eluded the deserving, so often settled itself on the odd, the bad, the peculiar, the damaged."

"They were his first friends, and he understood that friendship was a series of exchanges: of affections, of time, sometimes of money, always of information."

"Was couplehood truly the only evolutionary option? … Thousands of years of evolutionary and social development and this is our only choice?"

"By his age, you had met all the friends you would probably ever have. You had met your friends’ friends. Life got smaller and smaller."

"Everyone had feelings that they knew better than to act upon because they knew that doing so would make life so much more complicated."

"It was something he had never been able to explain to his friends, who marveled at and pitied him for how much he had to work; he could never tell them that it was at that office, surrounded by work and people he knew they found almost stultifyingly dull, that he felt at his most human, his most dignified and invulnerable."

"Relationships never provide you with everything. … You take all the things you want from a person- sexual chemistry, let’s say, or good conversation, or financial support, or sexual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty- and you get to pick three of those things. … the rest you have to look for elsewhere."

"You don’t visit the lost, you visit the people who search for the lost."

"If you act like you don’t belong, if you act like you’re apologetic for your own self, the people will start to treat you that way, too."