A journey to Italy, the Neapolitan novels

Everyday there's a chance that a stranger that you meet might end up becoming a dear

friend down the road. Having arrived in Montpellier only a few weeks before, such an event happened with an author. Discussing literature with a new university acquaintance, I discovered for the first time the Neapolitan Novels that that colleague had just started to read. Having come across it once more while browsing Goodreads and while watching an ARTE documentary, I had to find out what the fuzz was about. The Neapolitan novels is a 4-part series of works written by the anonymous Italian writer Elena Ferrante. The 4 books: My brilliant friend (2012), the story of a new name (2013), those who leave and those who stay (2014) and the story or the lost child (2015), are quite recent but are already considered by many to be timeless classics that will continue to embark countless generations to the Italian shores.

This marvellous literary work that spam almost 2000 pages is a coming-of-age story of a group of children in the poor suburbs of Naples in the 1950’s, whose life stories we follow closely until the early 2010’s. Along the way we discover their families, friends, relationships, the violence of their

neighbourhood and the struggle to grow up in an impoverished area, caught between a monotonous existence and illicit activities, extremist political parties, demeaning jobs and the daily struggle to survive and rise above their precarious conditions. The main character of the novel is Elena (often called “Lénu” or “Lenuccia”) who’s brilliant skills and diligent work in school help her attend high school, university and later become a prolific writer and columnist.

We follow Elena as she grows up and we discover different parts of Italy (Naples, Florence, Turin, Rome), France (Paris, Bordeaux, Montpellier), as well as countless other cities and countries, as she travels during her times as a student, a political activist and later a renowned author, as she tries to conciliate being a writer, mother, daughter, friend and countless other roles that create opportunities but also tensions in her daily life.

This book is a journey in countless ways. Not only do we live through countless places which we discover with a detailed and personal perspective in a beautiful written prose, but we also live through the very tumultuous times that followed WII and lead up to the cold war, such as the political rivalries, post-war reconstruction, the rise of modern industrialism and modern technologies, the cultural revolutions in Europe and the US. Finally, we also live the life journey of the author as the goes from an illiterate family who has to borrow her schoolbooks for school to her becoming an esteemed and renowned writer whose acquaintances are influential people in countless domains, and we can’t help but also mention the lives of Elena’s friends and family who all end up making different life choices but who all, unlike Elena, never manage to escape their social condition and neighbourhood.

As I arrived at the end of the book, I surprised myself being deeply attached to places, events, and people that I’d never met, and as I flipped the last page of this series, I couldn’t help but feel melancholic that from now on, I won’t be able to share those journeys with them anymore. Now one has to find a new journey to embark on.

-Ed.