I vividly remember how, during my second year of Bachelor’s in Zoom class, one of my favorite professors mentioned Elena Ferrante as one of the most important contemporary authors to follow in our lifetime. Since a friend and I always took this class together seated on my old uncomfortable couch in front of one laptop, I lurked and saw in his notes he put something along the lines of “read ferate??”
I, of course, immediately used the opportunity to mock his ignorance and in turn signal my perceived superior erudition and good taste… In addition, the professor who praised Elena Ferrante was one of the people who at that time could, only by acknowledging a thought of mine as not completely foolish, give me a giant self-esteem boost. That said, you can imagine my feeling of validation as I was telling myself “Yes, yes!!! There is something about her, I knew it!”
I have a very special relationship with the books of Elena Ferrante I have read so far, which are the four books of the Neapolitan Quartet ( My Brilliant Friend being the first and most famous of them) and after this week - The Lying Life of Adults. While I have to admit, the Neapolitan quartet remains my favorite book series ever, her latest work I also found incredibly meaningful and intriguing. It had been a few months since I last binge-read a Ferrante novel and so last Sunday I was genuinely happy to dive back into the complex Neapolitan webs of female relationships.
Set in the 1990s, at the beginning of the story, the main character Giovanna is a 12-year-old avid reader and only daughter of two upper middle class teachers in Naples. They often invite their family friends over for dinner and discuss Marxism, world affairs, philosophy and so forth. Meanwhile, the kids - Giovanna and the family friends’ two daughters, Angela and Ida, who are her best friends, absorb the way their parents speak, think, and act before returning to play. One day, in a conversation meant for grownups, Giovanna overhears her father disappointedly alluding to her resemblance to his sister Vittoria. Now, Aunt Vittoria who has stayed in the lower socio-economic class his side of the family comes from, is associated only with the malice, pettiness, lack of reason and even danger attributed to the lower class world of Naples..
Upon hearing this comparison, Giovanna concludes that her father called her plain ugly as this is what Aunt Vittoria and her world represent - innate and unescapable ugliness that she all of a sudden felt doomed to. Giovanna decides she needs to meet her Zia Vittoria . Throughout the book, Ferrante follows the young girl’s journey from age 12 to 16, which is fundamentally marked by her becoming part of this new Neapol - the poor and religious Neapol of Vittoria and her community. Giovanna quickly finds herself knee-deep in disorienting new mores, ideas and behaviors strikingly different from the ones she had thus far seen from her slightly pretentious secular parents’ education.
Eventually, at 15 years of age, after a dynamic coming-of-age path filled with adult lies, erratic emotions, her parents’ divorce and a tumultuous love-hate relationship with her aunt, Giovanna is taken to church by Vittoria to listen to Roberto. This young man is a theological scholar (or #hotpriest) who comes from the same poor neighborhood but is now an important academic in Milan. Then and there Giovanna immediately falls in love with him.
Ferrante is incredible in chronicling seemingly small life events or even simple conversations that deeply change the character’s life path. From the moment Giovanna meets Roberto, her trajectory and the fundamentals of her world shift.
Here is where, amongst many other virtues, I find the author doing something very interesting. Giovanna experiences love very intensely. As somebody who is also very, very emotional, I find an impressive soulfulness in a character who is able to feel so strongly. But this immense emotionality comes with the obsessive idealization of her object of desire. She and everybody around her finds Roberto innately extraordinary, intelligent and profound beyond comparison. Vittoria loves him, Giovanna’s father regards him as a the bright future of Italian academia, their mutual friend Tonino praises him:
Roberto was destined to a brilliant university career. Roberto had recently published an essay in a prestigious international journal. Roberto was good, he was modest, he had an energy that animated even the most disheartened people. Roberto inspired the best feelings. I listened without interrupting, I would have let that very slow accumulation of details go into eternity.
Reminiscent of the Neapolitan Quartet’s Nino Sarratore, Roberto seems to effortlessly have this infatuating effect on people of all ages and genders. And similarly to how Elena spent every waking hour reading books and newspapers in order to be able to match Nino’s intellectual might and perspicacity, Giovanna takes on reading Christian texts and philosophy in order to impress Roberto:
From that point on my heart raced. The fear that I might seem ignorant and unintelligent to Roberto kept me from sleeping and brought me with a step of calling my father to ask him questions about life, death, God, Christianity, Communism, so that I could use his answers, which were always crammed with knowledge, in a possible conversation.
While in The Lying Life of Adults, the female protagonist’s sudden driving force for applying herself in studies, books and questions about world affairs comes primarily from the want to impress a man, I feel that it still captures a very genuine part of the human condition. After all, who hasn’t felt the tantalizing and exhilarating drive to discuss ideas with their crush? Who hasn’t entered a playful back and forth during which everything said by the person you admire is registered and classified as intelligent and impressive, and your only hope is to, through intensive preparation and reading, get close enough in order to keep being a worthy participant in that exchange?
Nobody, only me?
Sure, if women are represented as only striving to become smart in the eyes of their superior intellectual males, that would be wrong. However, Ferrante shows these tendencies in female relationships as well. For instance, Giovanna’s friend Angela admits to often adjusting her taste and opinions according to whatever thoughts Giovanna expresses and Giovanna herself notices how Vittoria’s friend waits for her approval when tipping the toe in any take. Not to mention the dynamic between Elena and Lila in the Quartet, which often consisted of both of them studying, reading and philosophically engaging with the world only to try and match the other’s innate intellect, while always having something that escapes one of them, which they recognize the other possesses.
That is why, although I admit the slight unease when female heroines do things to impress men, when reading about Giovanna, Elena or Lila’s studious moments, I too get a surge of inspiration to read and discuss:
The Gospels, the father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, the tangle of faith and the absence of faith, the radical nature of Christ, the horrors of inequality, violence, always carried out against the weakest, the savage, the boundless world of the capitalist system, the advent of robots, the urgent need for Communism?
Oh, la la! Only if I had a hot academic crush (or hot priest) who magically recognizes my extraordinary innate perspicacity and encourages me to read more about all these concepts!
Each of those encounters improved me, Roberto’s words immediately set off a need for reading and information. The days became a race to arrive at a future meeting more prepared with complex questions on the tip of my tongue. I began to look through the book my father had left me home to find some that might be helpful for understanding. […] But understanding what, or whom? Through his perspective was broad Roberto was constantly moving beyond it, he blended together minor examples, stories, quotations, theories, and I tried to keep up, alternating between the certainty that I’d sounded like a girl who talks pretending to know and the hope that I’d soon have another chance to prove I was better than that.
Paragraphs like this one describing Ferrante’s female protagonists wanting to match the intellect of their counterparts (romantic or platonic) remind me of how I have felt with certain people in my life - some of my professors and friends who inspire me to reflect in new ways and read, read, read. And I often feel conflicted, am I genuinely driven by knowledge or am I driven by a desire to appear smart?
What has been special to me in that particular aspect of Ferrante’s fiction is that it made me see how beautiful this conflicting academic drive could be… She romanticizes the radical vivacity that some people have the power to bring out in you (again, be it crushes or friends you admire intellectually). After all, we all, at one point or another but especially in our youth, put certain people on a pedestal. Is it so wrong to have a crush whom you consider incredibly smart and inspiring and that awakens in you strong emotions? Strong emotions that lead to you wanting to get closer to their inner world and pick on their ideas? Moreover, what I find particularly endearing is the authenticity and acknowledgement of the characters that yes, they do indeed want to use their readings to impress, to bring up in conversations or to rise in status through education and so forth.
That said, this aspect of Ferrante’s writing is just one example of what evokes in me genuine feelings and I strongly recommend reading her if you haven’t! If you don’t trust me, remember my Sciences Po professor praised her too. She is incredible in creating complex characters with inextricably entwined lives, women who are strong, emotional and true, as well as worlds that blur the lines of all possible opposites - truth and lies, family and enemies, friends and rivals, lower and upper social classes - everything can always change, go back to its original, or even take another form. Furthermore, The Lying Life of Adults as well as the Neapolitan novels always move through a specific female gaze, which doesn’t give the vibe of “Oh, look at me, Henry Miller or Ernest Hemingway, who sits down and writes and is just smart!” It rather shows a new type of female intellectual strength, which is not foreign to self-doubt or softness.
Now all of that said, somebody find me a hot priest figure to discuss the Holy Spirit and the inevitable fall of capitalism with!