I feel I’m
a little late in getting to the Neapolitan quartet of which this is the first
book. Now that I’ve started on the
journey, I don’t think I’ll be stopping until I’ve finished all four.
4 Stars
At the age
of 66, Lila Cerullo has decided “no only to disappear herself . . . but also to
eliminate the entire life that she had left behind” so her friend Elena Greco decides
to write “all the details of our story, everything that still remained in my
memory” (23). What follows is the story
of the first ten years of their friendship, from the age of six to
sixteen.
The two
girls grow up in an impoverished neighbourhood on the outskirts of Naples in
the 1950s. Theirs is an intense but
complicated friendship: they love and
admire each other but they are also jealous and competitive, and though they
long for freedom, they also depend on each other. Elena says that from the beginning “I decided
that I had to model myself on [Lila], never let her out of my sight, even if
she got annoyed and chased me away. I
suppose that that was my way of reacting to envy, and hatred, and of
suffocating them” (46).
The two are
foil characters. Elena is polite, obedient,
dutiful, and well-behaved whereas Lila is impulsive and rebellious. Elena states that Lila “immediately impressed
me because she was very bad” (31). Virtually
everyone is afraid of Lila because “Lila was malicious: . . . she knew how to
wound with words [and] would kill without hesitation. . . . an essence not only
seductive but dangerous emanated from Lila” (143). Even Lila admits, “’The difference between
you and me, always, has been that people are afraid of me and not of you’”
(294).
The
similarity between the two is that both do well in school, Elena by dint of
hard work and Lila through natural intelligence. Elena is the one who continues in school, but
she clearly regards her friend as the brilliant one. At first both girls dream of escaping their
patriarchal society full of ignorance, poverty and violence, but eventually Lila
has little choice but to accept “the confines of the neighborhood” (79). The two girls end up taking very different
directions in life and at the end, one wonders if Lila is correct when she
calls Elena “’my brilliant friend’” who must keep studying and “’be the best of
all’” (312). Of course, Elena, having
chosen a path as a student is left feeling “completely alone” (322).
One of the
themes is the tragedy of unfulfilled potential.
Though Lila is the most intelligent student in her elementary school, Lila’s
parents deny her permission to attend middle school and continue on to high
school. Her father says, “’why should
[Lila], who is a girl, go to school?’” (69) so their teacher, who had nurtured both
girls, turns her back on Lila and tells Elena, “’And if one wishes to remain a
plebeian, he, his children, the children of his children deserve nothing. Forget Cerullo and think of yourself’” (72). Years later, this same teacher slams the door
in Lila’s face: “’I know Cerullo, I don’t
know who this girl is’’ (308). Just
before a climactic event in her life, Lila says, “’But yes, look: the mind’s
dreams have ended up under the feet.’
She turned with a sudden expression of fear. ‘What’s going to happen to me?’” (314) as
though she knows both her potential and dreams will be unfulfilled. And the twist in the last paragraph suggests
that her fear is justified.
One of the
things that stands out in the novel is the violence of the girls’ world. They are surrounded by the macho behaviour of
brothers and fathers who feel they must fight to defend their honour and that
of their families. Insults are almost
always met with violence. Elena admits, “I
feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and
outside, every day, . . . we grew up
with the duty of making it difficult for others before they made it difficult
for us. . . . The women fought among themselves more than the men, they pulled
each other’s hair, they hurt each other’ (37).
Elena witnesses a husband and wife fighting: he “yelled, threw things; his rage fed on
itself, and he couldn’t stop. In fact
his wife’s attempts to stop him increased his fury, and . . . he ended up
beating her” before he threw his daughter out the window “still screaming
horrible threats at his daughter. He had
thrown her like a thing” (82). It is
understandable why Elena wants to escape from her mother’s world (322).
There are a
lot of characters so I was often confused as to who is who. It is easy to confuse Alfonso with
Antonio. To complicate matters, people
often have more than one name: Lila is
also called Lina but her proper name is Raffaella; and Elena is sometimes
called Lenuccia and sometimes, Lenù. There
is an Index of Characters at the beginning and it is helpful, but having to
check it frequently becomes annoying.
I’m
hooked. I’m anxious to get to the next
book in the series, The Story of a New
Name, to find out what happens to the two brilliant friends.
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