elena ferrante

In the wake of the recent news about huge job losses in closing retail chain stores I had started a post about guaranteed jobs. But it will take a bit more research and thinking to make it hold as an article worth reading.
So, instead, here’s a post about Elena Ferrante. Or, to be more precise, about how I’m enjoying the first of The Neapolitan Novels.
My Brilliant Friend is wonderful.

It was my elder daughter who read the books first. A few years ago, while she was spending a year at home between university and moving to Malta. Then my wife read them. All four books sit on the shelf above the TV in the living room and I have looked at them from time to time and thought that I ‘should’ read them.

My wife watched the first series of the TV series in a binge last week. She said how good the series was and it reminded her how much she had enjoyed the books. “You really should read them,” she said.

In our house I am the self-appointed recommender of books. (I like to think I may even have recommended the Ferrante books to my daughter on the back of a review in the LRB or something — but that may be stretching my memory into the realms of pure fantasy.) Not that anyone takes much notice most of the time. Fair is fair, though.

I picked up the first of the books and started reading.

Wow.

I’ve been moaning recently that I have not been reading as much as I usually like to. I can see this book causing more problems disrupting my reading. I have had to ration myself for the last three days but I have still ripped through the first part of the book.

Not only is the prose wonderful — and credit must go to translator Ann Goldstein — but the characters of the children who populate the first section are perfectly drawn. It is a difficult task to make young children so interesting when their worlds are narrow and their experiences so limited. Ferrante conjures a narrow world that is somehow more than enough. Part of this, for me, was that it brought back so many memories of my own childhood. (And no, I didn’t grow up in Naples and I wasn’t a girl. Ferrante’s children are marvellously universal.) Unless I’m mistaken, the first mention of a date is in the second part of the book, just as the children are becoming adolescents. This timelessness of the first section only increases its universality.

And I’m going to stop there. I want to finish the book before I rave any more.

Here’s a brief report for January:
17600 words of the novel written (at a minimum of 500 words every day)
30 days of yoga
30 days of posts to this site
Books finished (from the list of 10):
• The Case for a Job Guarantee — Tcherneva
• Knife of Dreams — Jordan

That’s an unusually fallow month of reading for me but, because it’s a result of more writing and setting time aside for yoga, I’m prepared to accept it. It’s not the only reading I have been doing but it feels slightly disappointing nevertheless.

And here’s the plan for February:
Inspired by Anne Lamott’s story about the writing of her second novel (Rosie) which she retells in Bird by Bird, I’m using the next month to write a full treatment of the book I’m working on. Part of the problem is that I have been working on it a long time and I have taken breaks and attacked it at different places at different times. It is a bit of a mess and is getting harder and harder to hold complete in my head. Time, therefore, to get the story down and the way the characters change, who they are, why they act like they do, and what happens to them. More or less. I’m aiming for a full forty or fifty pages of treatment in the next 28 days.

I’ve joined the Seth Godin Akimbo Podcast Workshop, which starts tomorrow. I’m looking forward to learning some useful stuff from people also keen to ship a podcast. I joined the workshop rather than some normal hands-off course because a hands-off course would be my first choice. The Akimbo workshop stresses the necessity of joining in, of sharing knowledge, of engaging. I’m not someone who naturally plays well with others. So already I have the chance to learn something over and above whatever technical details I may glean about podcasting.

I want to complete more books from the list of ten. (I had thought I was going to add Olivia Manning’s The Great Fortune as a replacement for the Tcherneva but my wife has convinced me to start Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and, after 90 pages, I’m hooked. Sorry, Olivia.)

I’m going to continue with yoga. This month, though, I’m going to watch and follow a session for complete beginners every day until the moves and poses and flows become second nature — and I can feel myself improving. Still with Adriene, though. Given that the month of ‘lessons’ I just did with her is free, I thought it was only fair to download her FWFG app and subscribe to her channel. It still comes in at a ridiculously reasonable price — far cheaper than a class a week at a local yoga studio, were such things still open.

I’m also going to add some weight training this month. The combination of yoga and refraining from sugar in all the most obvious forms has had some impact on my weight and my BMI but I want to add a bit of additional strength and tone where yoga may take a bit of time getting there.

So, that’s the month ahead. I’m looking forward to it.

I’ve moved to Naples with Elena Ferrante

I stuck to my resolutions – that’s a first