Finally, I'm up for air, having surfaced from the Neapolitan series of novels by Elena Ferrante. For weeks now, I've been immersed in the four books – My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay and, finally, The Story of the Lost Child, the conclusion that was published to much anticipation earlier this month. Like many readers I know, I heard about them through word of mouth. Never have I felt so addicted to a story, a world of women so compelling, so unflinchingly honest, so brutal.
I was sucked into the Ferrante cult, led by a sensational author – someone The New York Times Book Review calls "One of the great novelists of our time" – whom nobody knows. Elena Ferrante is a pen name. The brief biographical notes on the book flap report that she is a woman, born in Naples, Italy, where the books are set. Before the Neapolitan series, she published three books, starting in 1991, but they weren't translated into English until 2005. The Neapolitan series was written in the past five years – and translated by Ann Goldstein – an unbelievable feat, given the scope of the story, spanning seven decades, from the end of the Second World War to present day. Such is the speculation about Ferrante's identity that some, mostly in Italy, suspect that she is not a woman at all, but a man, maybe even a group of men, churning out the dark, compulsive narrative.
It is impossible, as a reader, not to be riveted by the story of the two friends, Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo, through 1,500 pages, from girlhood in a violent, crime-infested neighbourhood of Naples through marriages, motherhood and lovers, escapes and returns, triumphs and disappointments. The bestselling books are impeccably plotted, told in a loose-limbed conversational style; a sort of rushed recounting of memory, as if our narrator (Greco, who is a feminist novelist) might forget everything that happened if she doesn't commit it, urgently, to paper.
But more than the plot and the long, colourful cast of characters, it is the books' depiction of female friendship, of the intimacy and alienation, the helping and the wounding, the competition disguised as empathy, the put-downs, the reprimands, jealousy, the olive branches and the reconciliations, that makes them compelling – and disturbing. The books depict far more than just the friendship of the women, of course. The political and cultural shifts in Italian life deftly play into the story. But these are books filled with feminine preoccupations – beauty, sexual allure, patriarchal expectations, insecurities, work, motherhood, pregnancies and men (husbands, exes and lovers).
"It is the exploration of the women's mental underground that makes the book so singular an achievement in feminist literature; indeed in all literature," wrote Joan Acocella in this month's New Yorker magazine about the last book in the quartet.
The series starts in the present as Elena Greco, 66, gets a call from Rino, the son of Lila Cerullo, who has disappeared without a trace. "We'll see who wins this time," she writes as she sets out to tell the story of the women's friendship. That the narrator remembers every detail, every psychological nuance, every twist of their relationship, sweeping back and forth from a close-up, blow-by-blow examination of a moment in the past to a broader recollection of it with the perspective of time, struck me as a shrewd insight into the way many women think.
As someone once said to me about raising boys as opposed to girls, "it's easier, because they don't hold grudges. With girls, they'll remember what you did that one time back in 1983 when you were in a bad mood."
Ferrante is not afraid to tell the unsayable, inner truths that many women feel about themselves and others. After Elena has her first child, she calls Lila to surprise her with the news, sugarcoating the difficult pregnancy, the birth. Lila, who also has a child by then, replies simply, "Each of us narrates our life as it suits us." Many women know that as much as female friendships are celebrated as confessional, they're also full of covert one-upmanship, with inconvenient parts about unhappiness or insecurities or incompetency erased in order to make the teller feel superior to the listener.
I underlined passages in the book, folded the corners of the pages, so moved was I by the insight. And now I think that Ferrante's anonymity holds a message.
Last month, her publisher, a small Italian press, Edizioni E/O, released a letter Ferrante wrote to them in 1991 before the publication of her first novel, Troubling Love. In it, she explains that she will not do any publicity other than answer questions in occasional e-mail exchanges. "I've already done enough for this long story: I wrote it," she wrote in a terse, frank manner.
In the same letter, Ferrante explains literary output as " a sort of nighttime miracle, like the gifts of the Befana [a figure in Italian folklore who delivers presents on Epiphany Eve], which I waited for as a child… True miracles are the ones whose makers will never be known; they are the very small miracles of the secret spirits of the home or the great miracles that leave us truly astonished."
Great or small, the impact of a work of fiction has its own life, as many writers often note. But the letter points to Ferrante's wish for autonomy, for distance, from the outcome of her creative gift. She wants to abandon that child.
In The Story of a Lost Child, there is a passage early on where Greco discusses a phrase others use to describe Nino Sarratore, the man she has loved since her childhood. "He has an intelligence without traditions," one character says. Greco asks what that means. "That he's no one," comes the reply. "And for a person who is no one to become someone is more important than anything else."
Ferrante, perhaps, wants to hold on to her anonymity as a way to remain authentic; to be who she is without surveillance, to own her identity. (And also, perhaps, to avoid judgment about how much of her work may be autobiographical.)
If the Neapolitan series is, to a certain extent, about the pursuit of autonomy, of emancipation, especially in the context of women's lives, which are complicated by the clinging demands of motherhood, family and work; the influence of gender, class and location; the intimacy and competition with female friends; and the pull of some men, despite their unsuitability, then Ferrante's anonymity makes perfect sense.
She doesn't want to compete with her books. Like a friend, like a child, like a partner, they are part of her – and not. She wants to be separate from them, uncompromised by their revelations, undisturbed by their needs, invisible in their dark mirrors.
In an unexpected twist on the feminist narrative, there is the possibility that even success can be like a bad sort of friend or lover, the kind who wants to eclipse you, not only, but also control you, preventing you from being who you truly are.