193. Naples Novels

Everyone loves Elena Ferrante. When someone learns of my interest in Italy, my love of reading and my preference for writing by and about women, they assume I love her, too.

For those unfamiliar, Elena Ferrante is the nom de plume of the author of a four-volume series about two girls growing up in poverty in Naples, beginning in the 1950s. They face the constraints of their gender and their economic status, and particularly for one of them, the oppression and violence of the roles of women within the family and within Naples society in that period. It’s bleak, it’s depressing, and clocking in at a total of nearly 1700 pages, it’s a very long haul. I read every word out of a sense of obligation, but it was not my cup of tea. I don’t like to rain on others’ enthusiasm, but my dirty little secret is: I didn’t like Elena Ferrante at all.

The same thing happened all over again when HBO turned the books into a series of four eight-episode seasons (the fourth expected to be released later in 2024). People asked me how excited I was to watch them and what I thought of the adaptation, assuming I’d been glued to my TV. In truth, I could only make it through one episode. The violence towards the female characters was just too much to take.

The New York Times has just published a list of the 100 best books of the 21st century so far, voted by 500 prose and poetry writers, poets, critics and others in the literary field. And what should be numero uno? My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante, the first book in the series, with the fourth book, The Story of the Lost Child, coming in at eightieth. (A novella by Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment, was #92.) There were a handful of other writers with two books on the list, but only Ferrante had three.

Some have suggested that perhaps my problem with Ferrante is that I am defensive about Italy, especially the South, and don’t like to see it depicted as a violent, primitive place, where women are abused, even if that was the reality in hard-scrapple sections of places like Naples.

That may be true, but I found another author who mines similar material, and whom I love, Domenico Starnone. His Strega Prize-winning novel,The House on Via Gemito, takes place at the same time and place as the Ferrante books, and God knows the women characters have violently difficult family lives, so it’s not because he paints a prettier picture that I like his work better. Perhaps it’s because we do not know his female characters as children and adolescents, as in the Ferrante books, so they don’t seem quite so painfully vulnerable, that I can tolerate his work. It seems to me that somehow, the female characters seem to have more power and agency, even within the terrible constraints of their culture and time and the way they are treated. Further, I also prefer his shorter novels set in current time to Ferrante’s, including her short present-day novella that also made the Times‘ list. I just find his characters more compelling and his plots more absorbing.

But here’s the kicker. The Times included a little story about the fact that after all these years, the mystery of the true identity of Elena Ferrante has never been solved. There has been all sorts of speculation, of course, but the prime suspect is … Domenico Starnone himself! Is it possible that he could have tweaked his style under his pen name to a degree that I liked it less, but the rest of the world liked it more? If it’s true, how did he have the time and energy to be so prolific, not just under one name, but two?

I would love to hear others’ reactions to the Ferrante series. Do two of them merit being named among the best hundred books of the century, so far? Let me know what you think.