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Neapolitan Chronicles

By Anna Maria Ortese, translated by Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee

New Vessel Press, 192 pages

Trick

By Domenico Starnone, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri

Europa Editions, 192 pages

In 1995 a young Italian novelist, whose debut had recently found success with a literary award and feature-film adaptation, responded in an interview about her novel’s setting, a proletarian Naples:

“As for Naples, today I feel drawn above all by the Anna Maria Ortese of The Involuntary City. If I managed again to write about this city, I would try to craft a text that explores the direction indicated there, a story of wretched petty acts of violence, a precipice of voices and events, small terrible gestures.”

The author was Elena Ferrante. Her interview response would turn prophetic: a decade and a half later, Ferrante would publish the first volume of her Neapolitan Quartet and, with it, her name (a pseudonym) would, for English-language readers at least, become synonymous with Naples.

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The Involuntary City, the piece of postwar reportage Ferrante references, originally appeared in Ortese’s 1953 book, Il mare non bagna Napoli, published in English this year for the first time as Neapolitan Chronicles. It is not the only book published in 2018 with ties to Ferrante. Domenico Starnone’s new novel, Trick, is haunted by the same mean streets as those of Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend.

When we read Ferrante in English, we do so through the prism of Ann Goldstein. It’s no coincidence she is also co-translator, with Jenny McPhee, of Ortese’s work. According to linguists at the University of Padua, Starnone’s writing bears such strong resemblance to Ferrante’s, he could be Ferrante. (Jhumpa Lahiri brings Starnone’s work into English – part of the Pulitzer-winning author’s continuing love affair with the Italian language.) Readers who inhaled the Neapolitan Quartet will find further connections with Neapolitan Chronicles and Trick, as both books explore a destitute, often violent, version of the southern city.

Naples had the unhappy distinction of being the most bombed Italian city of the Second World War up to the 1943 armistice. The social landscape left in the wake is the inescapable fact of Neapolitan Chronicles. Ortese, who was born in 1914 and died in 1998, spent her adolescence in Naples. When she returned in 1945, she found the port city “shattered” by war.

The war is most undeniably present in The Involuntary City, one of the book’s two pieces of reportage. In it, Ortese recounts her tour of Granili III and IV, a granary-turned-barracks heavily bombed by the Allies. Despite significant damage, by the time of Ortese’s visit it was home to 3,000 displaced Neapolitans, with as many as five families or 30 people to a room. In the upper levels, white-collar workers and their families continued to live middle-class lives, but as Ortese descends to the festering, cramped darkness of the lower storeys, the living conditions become horrific. Ortese encounters a woman whose face is covered by fungus; a child dies of unknown causes; large sewer rats wander the living spaces unperturbed.

“Granili III and IV is not only what could be called a temporary settlement of homeless people,” Ortese writes. “Only a profoundly diseased human system could tolerate, as Naples tolerates, without being disturbed, the putrefaction of one of its limbs.”

The war leaves its marks on Naples in other ways. In one of the three stories that open Neapolitan Chronicles, the war is the destitution in line for the Bank of Naples pawnshop. The war is there in the book’s permeating sense of disorientation and strangeness: in another story, a new pair of eyeglasses reveals with disturbing clarity the poverty that has surrounded a nearly blind child her entire life. It is there in Ortese’s stated desire to strip from Naples “the terrible myth of sentimentality.” The book’s original Italian title translates as “Naples is not bathed by the sea.”

By contrast, the war does not play large in Ferrante’s magnum opus. The first thing you likely hear about the Neapolitan novels is they are about the complications of female friendship. It’s this six-decade history of Elena and Lila, their deep affection mixed with envy and resentment, that makes these novels. But the city is more than backdrop.

Ortese’s apparent influence is in the petty, dispossessed quality to Ferrante’s Naples. Inextricably woven into the story of these two girls born at the end of the Second World War are the clashing movements of Italy’s postwar history as expressed in Elena and Lila’s poor neighbourhood.

Ferrante never names this neighbourhood, although it is likely based on working-class Rione Luzzatti, an area hemmed by train tracks leading to Naples’s central station. The defining quality of the neighbourhood Ferrante describes is disperazione, “a word that in dialect meant having lost all hope but also being broke.”

In her interview, Ferrante insists that hers is this vulgar Naples: “For a long time, I experienced the city I grew up in as a place where I continually felt at risk. It was a city of sudden quarrels, of blows, of easy tears, of minor arguments that ended in curses, unrepeatable obscenities, and irreparable breaks, of emotions so extreme as to become intolerably false.”

She continues, “I felt different from that Naples, I experienced it with revulsion, I ran away as soon as I could.”

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Daniele, the septuagenarian protagonist of Starnone’s Trick, also ran away from Naples as soon as he could, only to be pulled back against his will when his daughter, Betta, demands he look after his four-year-old grandson while Betta and her husband are away.

Daniele doesn’t want to go. He begs complications from recent surgery as well as his struggles with a recent commission to illustrate a deluxe edition of a Henry James ghost story, The Jolly Corner. Furthermore, he’s an old man and he doesn’t like his childhood home, where Betta and her family live. The reasons for his aversion creep up on the reader.

Trick, it turns out, is a kind of ghost story in conversation with James’s work. Daniele describes The Jolly Corner to his daughter as the story of a man who returns to his former home where he discovers the version of himself he would have become if he had never left. Returning to the blighted place of his adolescence similarly invokes Daniele’s ghosts, versions that express the hard truths of the streets where he grew up, just adjacent to Elena and Lila’s neighbourhood.

“It was as if various human types were lurking in my body, some violent, others wretched,” Daniel recounts. His escape to Milan decades earlier meant “to escape the numerous possible violent paths of my surroundings, all of them already embedded in the obscenity of the dialect I’d known since I was a child.”

The low socioeconomic status of Neapolitan dialect will be familiar to Ferrante’s readers. For Daniele, a single word encapsulates his Naples: “rage.”

“That word was frowned upon in school; teachers and professors would correct us. Not rage – they would scold – we say ire, rabid dogs rage. But the Neapolitan that was spoken in Vasto, at the Pendino, at the Market – the neighbourhoods where I was raised, and before that my father and grandparents and great-grandparents, maybe all my ancestors put together – didn’t know the word ire, the wrath of Achilles and others who lived in books. They only knew ’a raggia,' rage. The people in this city, I thought, in these neighbourhoods and squares and streets and alleyways and stalls by the port filled with toil and illegal loading and unloading, got enraged, they didn’t grow irate.”

Starnone is regarded as one of the finest writers working in Italian today, but many of Ferrante’s admirers will know Starnone’s name from various theories as to the pseudonymous author’s identity. From the beginning, Ferrante’s use of a pen name has stoked a desire among some readers to know the “true” person behind her novels. Ferrante insists that maintaining distance between her biography and her writing is essential to her work.

In October, 2016, going against Ferrante’s expressed desire for anonymity, reporter Claudio Gatti surmised that based on royalties and real estate transactions, Elena Ferrante is Italian translator Anita Raja. Gatti further suggested a possible “unofficial collaboration” in writing the Neapolitan novels between Raja and her husband, Starnone.

Then, last year, a group of linguists and computer scientists at the University of Padua analyzed 150 novels by 40 contemporary Italian writers and concluded that Starnone is Ferrante, based on stylistic similarities in their work. For his part, Starnone has flatly denied either being Ferrante or collaborating on the Neapolitan novels.

What little we know of Elena Ferrante’s life may also well be fiction – the writer “Elena Ferrante” might be Ferrante’s best character. In the absence of sure biographical detail, readers are left with Ferrante’s novels and a feeling for her city. What we can say is that Ferrante claims Ortese as an influence and there are thematic and stylistic correspondences between the works of Ferrante and Starnone. Does a reader need more?

Disperazione, disorientation, rage: Ferrante, Ortese and Starnone each draws out a different but related prevailing emotion of Naples. Theirs are not the same books, for sure, but let’s say they are in the neighbourhood.

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