FICTION IN REVIEW: ELENA FERRANTE

1 5 8 Y F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W A B I G A I L D E U T S C H It’s no wonder that Ra√aela Cerullo – a.k.a. Lina, Cerullo, Signora Carracci, and above all Lila – goes by so many names. Ever charming , ever changing, the character fluctuates between angel and devil, savior and siren, as she enchants and ensnares everyone she meets. In the third installment of Elena Ferrante’s marvelous Neapolitan novels – a series that describes the friendship between Lila and the narrator, Elena Greco – Ferrante asks unnervingly incisive questions about the nature of identity: How, in a world filled with others (especially others like Lila), can we ever be entirely ourselves? How, being ourselves, can we aspire to improve ? And how, in a world that refuses to stop evolving, can we hope to stay the same? An early scene in the first Neapolitan novel, My Brilliant Friend, finds our heroines, then young girls, playing in a courtyard . After they trade dolls, Lila suddenly throws Elena’s doll – the prettier one – down a sewer grate. Elena promptly does the T h o s e W h o L e a v e a n d T h o s e W h o S t a y , by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein (Europa, 400 pp., $18 paper) 1 5 9 R same to Lila’s. This interaction isn’t mere child’s play: it sets out patterns that will mark the rest of the girls’ lives. These friends will compare belongings and copy behaviors; both will give and both take away. In the end, Elena will come to rely on Lila so intensely that she sometimes yearns to abandon her friend altogether – to toss her out, as she does Lila’s doll. The exchange of dolls, those smaller versions of Elena and Lila, represents something else for the girls, too: early in their friendship , they have already exchanged pieces of themselves. In the thick of a schoolyard brawl, Elena finds herself unable to leave Lila’s side: ‘‘In a confused way,’’ she reflects, ‘‘I felt that if I ran away with the others, I would leave with her something of mine that she would never give back.’’ If something of Elena lives in Lila, so does something of Lila live in her – and it will linger forever. Even once Elena has grown up and moved away from their hometown of Naples, Lila remains with her: it’s ‘‘as if Lila were squatting in a corner of my mind and I felt her feelings,’’ Elena muses in Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the third novel in Ferrante’s series and the most recent to appear in translation. Early on, Lila’s influence is subtler but no less significant; in My Brilliant Friend, the schoolgirl Elena begins to channel Lila’s brashness, her desires, her demands. When two boys ask to see her breasts, she says yes, setting terms Lila would approve of: the boys must pay her before she lifts her shirt. The girls are at once doubles and opposites, one nicknamed Lina and one Lenù, one dark-haired and one blond, one harsh and one gentle, both considered the most promising students in the neighborhood elementary school. Yet the suspicion that Lila is the more brilliant, that Elena is second to her in intelligence, just as she was the second one to toss a doll down the grate, haunts our narrator. And how could it not? Even we might feel a frisson of insecurity when we read how, as a little girl, Lila teaches herself to read, or how as an adolescent she teaches herself Latin. She forges library cards for each of her family members and takes out the maximum number of books under every account. She produces gorgeous drawings. She solves complex math problems. She produces a striking if brief ‘‘novel’’ – a clutch of handwritten pages called ‘‘The Blue Fairy.’’ The title is no accident: there’s something fantastical, otherworldly, about 1 6 0 D E U T S C H Y Lila...