Old romances; the tiny slights of a domineering mother; the status anxieties of growing up parochial: Ferrante has written a book that feels as rich and layered as life itself.
Ferrante has moved into more overtly psychological territory. A portrait of the dynamic of a friendship has mutated into a weightier, more uncanny exploration of the antipathy of love, of our compulsion to create one another, over and over again.
In Elena and Lila, Ferrante’s modern woman is bisected and given two faces; where in her other works the divided woman speaks to and wrestles with herself, the Neapolitan series externalizes and literalizes those politics to show their almost insurmountable complexity.
'The Neapolitan Novels,' taken together as one long epic that stretches from childhood to old age, are so smart about the darker currents of female friendships, the discrepancies between sexual desire and sexual politics, the high cost of a class migration like Elena's, and the ultimate 'velocity with which life [is] consumed.'
As the Neapolitan novels progress, the books come to seem less and less a work of realist autobiographical fiction about female friendship and more and more a covertly mythic tale of the creation of a self through agonizing division and uneasy reintegration.
Ferrante’s importance ultimately lies not in her masterly plotting, her no-false-note sentences, but in her dedication to the bloodletting truth of a woman’s experience, set free, as the author herself has said in interviews, by her chosen anonymity.
In its breadth and sweep, Ferrante’s series has also been compared to the work of Balzac and Dickens. But her affinity with such writers is most evident in the depth of Ferrante’s psychological insight; the creation of interior lives so vivid that we seem to breathe along with her characters, from moment to moment.
A large part of Ferrante’s genius is her capacity to show that the conflict her narrator articulates is a false dilemma: It’s possible to imitate the 'shapeless banality of things' within the confines of a taut, propulsive story.
Fiction like this is not often written: the friendship of two girls becoming women in the context of their culture, a poverty-stricken neighborhood of Naples in postwar Italy, with all its superstitions, politics, corruption, sexism and violence.
The Neapolitan quartet succeeds in capturing life as lived, the striving female mind, the power of unknowing, the idea that agency within one's fate, not the fate itself, is what truly matters.
She has charted, as precisely as possible, the shifts in one person’s feelings and perceptions about another over time, and in so doing has made a life’s inferno recede even as she captures its roar.
...[I]t takes a transcendent imagination to write a life that reads as if it actually happened, in our own world, and not too long ago. We're lucky to have one such imagination working now, that of Italian novelist Elena Ferrante.
