L'amica geniale (2011, English Translation 2012)
This edition: 2015 by Blackstone Audiobooks, read by Hilary Huber
My cultural life has been greatly enriched by audio books in the car, the workshop, the garden and the kitchen. Generally I only listen to unabridged versions. Anything else is usually too short and usually a disservice to the author, not that some wouldn't benefit from editing. Dickens springs to mind, particularly the excruciating patois of his many unfunny comic characters. True, he wrote to deadlines in instalments but it is a pity that Trollope or Thackeray couldn't have taken him to one side for a quiet word. But my putative reader's patience is wearing thin and I will get on with this brief review.
I do not feel any special need to read fashionable books but Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan sequence has been very successful; it was time to give it a try. We do not know a great deal about the author, despite efforts to reveal her, but she is said to have been born in 1943 in a poor neighbourhood of Naples, which she escaped through intelligence and application to her education. The novel seems highly autobiographical but who can tell? Elena, the daughter of a porter at the town hall and a crippled mother with a cast in one eye is overshadowed by her friend Lina, the daughter of the neighbourhood cobbler, who has a fierce intelligence. Their lifelong friendship underpins the novels. This first book covers their childhood from seven to seventeen and ends with an imminent row at Lina's wedding. By this point it is clear that Elena, who went on to high school pushed by an influential teacher, has gradually become alienated from her background and is on a trajectory towards an educated middle class life. Lina decided to stay in the neighbourhood but has chosen to marry the well-off grocer's son to escape her family.
The translation seems quite reasonable and the reading is assured. Although the oppressive sense of the neighbourhood and the conventions and taboos are very clear, the book never really came alive for me. There is little sense of humour and surely laughter would have been a vital means of fighting the often dire circumstances the people of Naples faced following World War II? The hostilities between the small family businesses who did well out of the war and the poorer inhabitants adds to an archaeology of grudges and feuds. Who was a communist and who a fascist? The Camorra are mentioned but mafia activity is only a minor theme. Eventually the predictably stifling nature of these densely populated streets, with their strutting boys and men fighting and upholding the honour of the girls and women needing are just too dispiriting. I think that I am unlikely to go back for more.
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