Your name is no longer Cerullo. You are Signora Carracci and you must do as I say.The Story of a New Name resumes the story of Elena and Lila – starting with a scene from 1966 in which Elena, entrusted with her friend's private journals and writing exercises, throws them into the Arno River – and then rewinds to where My Brilliant Friend left off: at Lila's wedding to the rich grocer, Stephano. As in the first volume of this series, it would seem that the friendship of these women is like a seesaw: when one is up, the other is down; forever in peaks and valleys; neither finding a point of equilibrium. Again, author Elena Ferrante uses straightforward, plain language to capture what is essential in life, in friendship, in the Italian experience, and again, I was spellbound – frustrated, appalled, and enchanted – until the final, surprising scene. Everyone should be reading these books. This will include spoilers from here.
At the end of the last book, right in the middle of her wedding reception, Lila realised that her new husband had already betrayed her: giving the fateful shoes to the man she despised. Thinking that she had traded her freedom for her family's comfort – a deal she had been happy to accept – when Lila finds out that the Solaras (and their mob money) are the real backers of the shoe factory, she is filled with remorse and disgust: she no longer wants Stephano. When she tries to resist him on their wedding night, however, Stephano beats and rapes her; as is his right in their mutual understanding.
We had grown up thinking that a stranger must not even touch us, but that our father, our boyfriend, and our husband could hit us when they liked, out of love, to educate us, to reeducate us.Meanwhile, Elena continues her studies and nurses her lifelong crush for the fiercely intelligent Nino. When Elena is brought along as a paid companion for Lila and her sister-in-law on a beach vacation, Nino enters the scene and Lila is also captivated by the young man's mind. Lila – she who has all the trappings of wealth and comfort and security – takes from Elena the one thing the latter really wants: Nino's love. As Lila and Nino embark on a doomed romance, Elena wins a scholarship to the university in Pisa and attempts there to erase the lingering effects of her impoverished Neapolitan youth. Yet, no matter how Elena tries – no matter that she now speaks perfect Italian without a regional accent, is at the top of her classes, has a knowledge base that allows her to converse intelligently around academics – Elena understands that at her core, she'll always be a hick who is one insult away from resorting to violence and vulgarity.
I hadn't really succeeded in fitting in. I was one of those who labored day and night, got excellent results, were even treated with congeniality and respect, but would never carry off with the proper manner the high level of those studies. I would always be afraid: afraid of saying the wrong thing, of using an exaggerated tone, of dressing unsuitably, of revealing petty feelings, of not having interesting thoughts.At the same time that Elena realises that her upbringing has not prepared her for polite, intelligent society, Lila is attempting to raise her young son in a stimulating and loving environment; attempting to override the exact same effects that Elena had regretted. By the end of this book, Elena has written (by some unknown compulsion) her first novel, which is met with success. It is only after rediscovering a story that the school-aged Lila had written that Elena realises that “The Blue Fairy” was the heart of her own narrative; proving once again that even when the two friends are no longer in contact, Lila is at the center of everything Elena does. Elena returns to Naples in triumph, wanting to track down Lila and return to her the sole copy of “The Blue Fairy”, but when she finds her, Lila is now living in squalor with her protector Enzo and working herself ragged at a sausage factory.
I understood that I had arrived there full of pride and realized that – in good faith, certainly, with affection – I had made that whole journey mainly to show her what she had lost and what I had won. But she had known from the moment I appeared, and now, risking tensions with her workmates, and fines, 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 every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.Even when Elena is winning in this unspoken contest, Lila won't let her win. So, that's the plot, but the plot is only there to illuminate these women and their experience of femininity and sorority. The beatings and the backstabbing and the clawing for status amongst their cohort in Naples is made doubly disturbing by the quiet acceptance of these as the norm. As Lila watches her family lose the shoe business, as she acknowledges her brother beating his wife as a revenge against her own cheating husband, she accepts that her sacrifices had been for nothing. Are all women's sacrifices, therefore, for nothing? What of their stooped and bent mothers, quietly taking their own beatings in due course? Elena and Lila, each in her own way, end this cycle: the one by devouring all the education she can access, the other by refusing to live quietly in a gilded cage. While the book begins with Lila being told that she will be defined forevermore by the adoption of her husband's name, by the end, she has shed it, becoming Cerullo once again. As for Elena, she is so enchanted by the sight of her name on the cover of the book she has written that she explains to her mother that even if she marries, she will always publish under Greco, her maiden name.
I said to myself every day: I am what I am and I have to accept myself; I was born like this, in this city, with this dialect, without money; I will give what I can give, I will take what I can take, I will endure what has to be endured.I love that we get this story from Elena's conflicted point of view, filled in with details from Lila's journals. You almost sense that Elena doesn't even particularly like her oldest friend, but whenever they get together after an absence, Lila is delighted to see her; knows that Elena is the one person that she can trust with her secrets and her love; and while Elena wants this place in Lila's life, it's all so tangled. On the one hand, Elena enjoys academic success, but is jealous of Lila's unique intelligence; even copying her style of writing for her first novel. People are often telling Elena that she's actually the better looking of the two, and yet, every single boy that they grew up with is more attracted to Lila. An old ally on the island of Ischia explains to Elena after meeting her friend for the first time, “Signora Lina knows that you're better than her and so she doesn't love you the way you love her”. Although Elena secretly enjoys this analysis, she's even more amused when this old woman shares what Nino's father has said about her friend, that “Lila had an almost ugly beauty, a type that males are, yes, enchanted by but also fear...The fear that their thingy won't function or it will fall off or she'll pull out a knife and cut it off.” Well, how do you compete with that?
It's so hard to capture what in Ferrante's writing makes these books seem special, but I feel like I've participated in an event when I finish one; can't wait to get to the next. I like that we begin The Story of a New Name with Elena destroying Lila's notebooks in the river and end with Lila destroying her one attempt at fiction, “The Blue Fairy”, in a fire; and yet, between the pages of this book, Elena has memorialised her friend after all. I like that Elena briefly explains how she used the tools of fiction to capture and explode the events of this book in her own first novel, and in some meta way, if the Neapolitan Series is indeed an autobiographical attempt by the pseudonymous Elena Ferrante, then this is some next level matryoshka doll of a novel. Perhaps, after all, it's most true when Lila cryptically states of books:
I've had it, it's always the same story: inside something small there's something even smaller that wants to leap out, and outside something large there's always something larger that wants to keep it a prisoner.
I was working at Chapters the other day, and when I saw a woman sighing at the kiosk, I asked if there was something I could help her with. She doubted it, but asked if I knew anything about modern Italian literature; was there anything I could recommend? How wonderful that I had this series at the tip of my brain! Yet, somehow, describing these books as the story of a friendship and the story of postwar Italy itself didn't really make this woman excited. I led her to the Ferrante section, pointed out the other, earlier, novels, and the woman dismissed me as she considered her options. I wish I could just have just shaken her and said, "Read them! Read them all!"
The following really got to me, but had no home in the review:
I thought: yes, Lila is right, the beauty of things is a trick, the sky is the throne of fear; I'm alive, now, here, ten steps from the water, and it is not at all beautiful, it's terrifying; along with this beach, the sea, the swarm of animal forms, I am part of the universal terror; at this moment I'm the infinitesimal particle through which the fear of everything becomes conscious of itself; I; I who listen to the sound of the sea, who feel the dampness and the cold sand; I who imagine all Ischia, the entwined bodies of Nina and Lila, Stephano sleeping by himself in the new house that is increasingly not so new, the furies who indulge the happiness of today to feed the violence of tomorrow. Ah, it's true, my fear is too great and so I hope that everything will end soon, that the figures of the nightmares will consume my soul. I hope that from this darkness packs of mad dogs will emerge, vipers, scorpions, enormous sea serpents. I hope that while I'm sitting here, on the edge of the sea, assassins will arrive out of the night and torture my body. Yes, yes, let me be punished for my insufficiency, let the worst happen, something so devastating that it will prevent me from facing tonight, tomorrow, the hours and days to come, reminding me with always more crushing evidence of my unsuitable constitution.And then: the worst happened.
