The Bracelet

I feel drained at the end of an Elena Ferrante novel. Her precisely detailed representations of the inner emotions are riveting and incredibly powerful, but also feel a little bit like watching a medical dissection. Every thought, whether charmingly appealing or startlingly prurient or bitterly vengeful, is laid out for the reader. It’s hard to pull your eyes away, but at the same time, it can feel voyeuristic and almost exhausting.

I should say at the outset that I’ve only read two other Ferrante books: Days of Abandonment and the first of her famous Neapolitan Quartet: My Brilliant Friend. Superficially, her latest novel, The Lying Lives of Adults, might seem more like My Brilliant Friend, since both have adolescent girls as their main characters. In my reading, though, the sheer intensity of the novel reminded me more of Days of Abandonment, which featured a woman whose husband had just left her for another.

Giovanna is 12 when the novel starts, and a relatively privileged girl living in a nice area of Naples with parents who are teachers. As told by Ferrante, class is woven into every part of Neapolitan life: where they live, the schools they attend, whether they speak ‘dialect’ or ‘hypercorrect Italian’, their accessible jobs and possible futures. Yet Giovanna’s father came from poor circumstances and has a large family living in the poorer areas of Naples; he has cut all ties with them. Most hated of all is his sister Vittoria, and so Giovanna is devastated to overhear her father:

in one of the tones that he never used with me — even giving in to dialect, which was completely banned in our house — let slip what he surely wouldn’t have wanted to come out of his mouth:

“Adolescence has nothing to do with it: she’s getting the face of Vittoria.”

[…] So it was that, at the age of twelve, I learned from my father’s voice, muffled by the effort to keep it low, that I was becoming like his sister, a woman in whom — I had heard him say as long as I could remember — ugliness and spite were combined to perfection.

Giovanna looks for photos to verify this similarity of appearance, but finds that all the old images of Vittoria have been carefully blacked out. She asks her friends if she is ugly, over and over again. Consumed by nervous curiosity, she decides the only option is to see the infamous Vittoria for herself, to find out what she herself will become. She finds Vittoria’s phone number and calls her, but hangs up without saying anything. She studies maps to see what route she might take to Vittoria’s house. Eventually she meets Vittoria and finds herself even more obsessed by her aunt’s history and openness than with her face.

Seventeen years ago, Vittoria had been in love with a married man, Enzo.

[Vittoria] Your father is a jerk. He erased my Enzo, the person I was most fond of. […] He let him think they were friends and then he took away his soul, he tore it out and cut it into tiny pieces.

[Nella, Giovanna’s mother] She refused to accept your father’s success. […] She blames her brother for [her low status as a maid]. Your father saved her. She could have ruined herself even further. She was in love with a married man who already had three children, a criminal. Your father, as the older brother, intervened. She put that, too, on the list of things she’s never forgiven him for.

Almost casually, Ferrante introduces the bracelet that will be so central to the plot. Vittoria had given a bracelet to Giovanna at birth, and asks why she is not wearing it. Giovanna knows of no bracelet, and when questioned, nor does her mother. The secrets that are exposed with the discovery of the bracelet lead the implosion of Giovanna’s family life.

Another writer might have stopped with this revelation, but Ferrante follows Giovanna much further, into the fraying and dissolution of her former friendships and the founding of new, into casual fumbles with boys and a passionate infatuation with one, through the class structure built into the city, and into her dawning understanding of the imperfections of her own parents.

Throughout, Giovanna’s voice is completely, utterly believable. She has always been slightly in the shadow of her wealthy friends Angela and Ida, but now she can trade exciting stories of her newfound eccentric relatives:

So a situation was created in which my friends continuously asked me for new details about Vittoria, Tonino, Corrado, Guiliana and their mother, and I didn’t have to be asked twice to provide them. Up to a certain point, everything went well. Then they asked asking if they could meet at least Aunt Vittoria and Tonino. [..] I was disoriented during that autumn, squeezed between the pressures of my friends and Vittoria’s. The former wanted to verify that the world I was entering really was more exciting than the one we lived in; the second seemed close to pushing me away from that world, from her, unless I admitted that I was on her side and not my father’s and mother’s.

Giovanna is not necessarily a likeable character, and nor are any of the others; it’s a testament to Ferrante’s skill that the reader becomes so involved in these distinctive, original characters who seem so real that one would not be surprised to meet one crossing the road in Naples.

Perhaps the only section of the book that was not enthralling was the ending, which seemed somewhat rushed and slightly unconvincing.

For all that I was riveted reading it, I don’t think I’d have the fortitude to tackle another Ferrante without a goodly break. That visceral involvement in Giovanna’s feelings was quite draining. This too, is a testament to Ferrante’s writing.

This is a remarkably good translation. The language is not colloquial English, but is slightly unnatural, so that the reader is always aware at some level that the original is in a different language. Yet it’s smooth enough that it doesn’t distract from the reading at all. It’s good enough to make you wonder what the Italian original would be like, something that I shall, unfortunately, never know.