News about this main European diva of our days, almost for the first time, leaked into the domestic media space quite recently - in connection with the loud scandal that broke out around her. Over the years, the writer, hiding under a pseudonym, managed to successfully maintain her anonymity - despite millions of copies and enormous popularity. However, in September, meticulous journalist Claudio Gatti made public the results of his investigation: in fact, Elena Ferrante is a translator Anita Raya, who lives with her writer husband in Rome. The literary world has split in two: some (led by Salman Rushdie) defend the sacred right of the writer to hide in the shadow of his books, others believe that "the reader has the right to know." And right now, finally, the first part of Ferrante's "Neapolitan tetralogy" is being published in Russian - the novel "Brilliant Girlfriend". Moreover, it comes out not from one of the majors of our book market (which, in theory, should have fought to the blood for the right to publish Ferrante), but in a pretty, but small "Sinbad" - which, alas, also does not characterize our book industry in the best way.
Elena Ferrante is a pseudonymous Italian novelist. Ferrante's books, originally published in Italian, have been translated into many languages. Her four-book series of Neapolitan Novels are her most widely known works.
Retelling Ferrante's prose is a hopeless task: no matter what you do, you still get a soap opera with elements of social drama. 50s of the XX century, a poor area on the outskirts of Naples, where women pull each other's hair right on the street, where a person who can read is reputed to be a dangerous intellectual, and men swear and beat children even when sober, where no one has ever seen the sea, where death and injury are as much a part of everyday life as breakfast or a cup of coffee, and the dream of any girl is to grow up and get a “clean” job in a haberdashery store. It is in this environment, well known to us from the films of Italian neorealism, that two heroine girls grow up, two best friends - the meek, pretty Elena, the daughter of a porter in the municipality, and the shoemaker's daughter Lila - skinny, evil and unsurpassed in everything, no matter what. was taken, whether it was Latin grammar or obscene language, dancing or mental arithmetic.
Their key difference is that Elena can't do without Leela, and Leela can't do without Elena, and so their friendship has a strange, poignant asymmetry from the start. The relationship of Lila and Elena with each other and with neighbors (all of them - almost four dozen characters - are listed neatly, as in a play, at the very beginning of the book, and the circle of characters is exhausted by them), intrigues and dramas of a local scale, love and betrayal, stages of growing up, attempts to break out of their miserable little world and the inevitable return to it, and at the end - a wedding that does not promise either happiness or peace, but quite unambiguously promises the second volume. That, in fact, is the whole plot of the “Brilliant girlfriend”.
However, what in the retelling looks like a melodrama with a more than modest emotional budget, in reality turns into a page-turner of irresistible force and not quite clear nature. Just like the gloomy and unprepossessing silent Lila, who has a strange power over people, Elena Ferrante manages to bewitch the reader without using any tricks and tricks visible to the eye. You take on the “Brilliant Friend” not without disgust, feeling like a kind of enlightened colonialist, carefully stepping along the dirty street of a Papuan village. However, after 30 pages you find that all these Papuans, all these unwashed, rude and illiterate Alfonso, Rino, Enzo, Carmela and Melina, turn out to be closer to your blood relatives, and their petty squabbles and modest achievements cause a burning, not abstractly cultural, but quite a human interest. So sharp that I personally, having barely turned the last page of the Russian translation of The Brilliant Girlfriend, went to Amazon and ordered all three of the next novels in the cycle in English - I don’t read Italian, and the thought of long months of waiting for the Russian translation seemed to me unbearable.
Orhan Pamuk, Fazil Iskander, Arundati Roy - the deceptively simple soap opera Elena Ferrante is in fact deeply literary, and of course her novel lies within the same paradigm of cultural appropriation as the books of these acclaimed classics. She talks about the foreign and the exotic as if it were her own, and as a result, the boundary between the author and the reader, between the real world and the novel world collapses, and the originally alien suddenly turns out to be close, understandable and dear. However, in order to read these cultural codes, in order to discern the virtuoso machinery hidden inside the "Brilliant Girlfriend", you will need time and emotional effort - because for this you need to internally unstick yourself from Ferrante's text and at least temporarily leave the soul of the dirty Neapolitan suburb. And that's easier said than done.
This article was sponsored by Susan Shapiro
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