Elena Ferrante – My Brilliant Friend, Nov 19, 2021

 

My Brilliant Friend – first edition of the English translation, 2012, by Europa Editions

“Elena Ferrante may be the best contemporary novelist you have never heard of,” said The Economist in a review one year after Europa Editions brought out the English translation of L‘amica geniale as My Brilliant Friend.  In the years following 2012 three other novels were published that follow the two friends as they grow up – The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014), and The Story of the Lost Child (2015). The four novels constitute the Neapolitan Novels quartet by Elena Ferrante. The first two books in the series have been adapted into an HBO television series entitled My Brilliant Friend.

The HBO Series starring Gaia Girace as Lila and Margarita Mazzuco as Lenù

Elena Ferrante, the author, has maintained a studied anonymity, although she is willing to answer questions by e-mail, via her publisher. Her translator into English, Ann Goldstein, an editor at The New Yorker, did not have access to her directly; the film directors who transferred her novels to the screen had only the most fleeting help from her. Her attitude is summed up in a comment she made: “I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.”

A collection of essays, letters and interviews by Elena Ferrante

In a collection of essays, letters and interviews called Frantumaglia (meaning ‘fragments’) the author answers questions her readers have asked her. She speaks of the joys, the hardships, and the anxieties of those who tell a story. We learn about the cities in which she has lived. Childhood, she says, is a warehouse for a thousand suggestions and fantasies. She also deals with motherhood and feminism. 

Elisa Del Genio (Lenù) and Ludovica Nasti (Lila) in the HBO series Season 1

It was James Wood in a review in The New Yorker in 2013 who brought to the attention of the English-speaking world the writing of Elena Ferrante. He reviewed the four novels available in English at the time, Troubling Love, Days of Abandonment, The Lost Daughter, and My Brilliant Friend. Wood noted that the “the material that the early novels visit and revisit is intimate and often shockingly candid: child abuse, divorce, motherhood, wanting and not wanting children, the tedium of sex, the repulsions of the body, the narrator’s desperate struggle to retain a cohesive identity within a traditional marriage and amid the burdens of child rearing.” 

For Ferrante’s heroines, life is a conundrum of attachment and detachment. Illustration by Annette Marnat in The New Yorker

Poetry Session – Oct 29, 2021

Shelley claimed poets were “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Their moral influence on politics is exemplified by the spoken words which struck the world’s conscience when a young Sudanese-American poet was invited to tell the gathered attendees of COP26 in Glasgow what was happening as a result of climate change to the voiceless people of the world.

Emtithal Mahmoud shooting her poem about the devastating impact of climate change – ‘Earth began to purge us too’

We are treated at every poetry session to a similar experience as our readers declaim their selections. The written and the spoken words inspire us and we return energised to our lives, grateful for a hour or two of the human spirit bursting forth in word and song (yes, we listened to Leonard Cohen, that twin of Bob Dylan).

Two of our readers are leaving the group for personal reasons. We shall keep in touch directly; and indirectly through this blog. On occasion we have had past members join us for particular sessions.

The next meeting will be to read Elena Ferrante’s novel, My Brilliant Friend, on Nov 19 via Zoom. For those who have purchased the 4-novel Kindle edition, MBF, the first novel, ends at Chapter 62 with the sentence: “It was the pair she had made with Rino, making and unmaking them for months, ruining her hands.”