Saturday, February 9, 2019
Elena Ferrante's brilliant Neapolitan quadrilogy
Wednesday, January 25, 2023
The lies we tell others and ourselves
I am currently watching The Lying Life of Adults series on Netflix, based on the book of the same name by Elena Ferrante. I read the book in 2021 and wrote a post about it (A New Yorker in Oslo: Elena Ferrante's The Lying Life of Adults (paulamdeangelis.blogspot.com). The Netflix series encompasses six episodes, and I've already seen four of them. Elena Ferrante has been involved in the writing of the script for the series, and you can always tell when she has had her hand in things. There is a certain identifying mark that raises the overall quality to very good (this series: The Lying Life of Adults (TV Series 2023– ) - IMDb) to superb (My Brilliant Friend on HBO: My Brilliant Friend (TV Series 2018– ) - IMDb ). The series was created by Edoardo De Angelis (every time I see his last name on the screen I have to smile since it is my last name as well, spelled the same way). His wife Pina Turco plays Nella, whose husband Andrea leaves her for Costanza, a family friend. But by extension, he leaves his teenage daughter Giovanna as well. The series is about Giovanna (very well-acted by Giordana Marengo) and her growing up amidst the turmoil around her: her parents' separation and divorce; her father's eventual remarriage to Costanza and his new home in Posillipo (an affluent area of Naples) on the Gulf of Naples; Giovanna's introduction to her aunt Vittoria (wonderfully-acted by Valeria Golino) and to the family of Enzo, Vittoria's now-deceased lover; her relationships with her two best friends, Angela and Ida, who just happen to be Costanza's daughters. But it is her relationship with Vittoria (Andrea's sister whom he cannot abide) that changes her life and moves her firmly into adulthood.
Andrea, Nella, Costanza, Mariano (Costanza's ex-husband), and Vittoria all lie to others and to themselves. Andrea and Costanza have lived a lie for years by having an affair and keeping it secret. Nella has either refused to see the truth or has turned a blind eye to it; in any case, she continues to defend Andrea and to call him a good man. Vittoria initially seems to be the most honest of all the adults in Giovanna's life, but she too turns out to be a liar who tells herself and others (particularly Giovanna) that she loved only Enzo and has never been with another man since he died, but this is not true. Giovanna learns that she cannot trust very many people, which of course is the demarcation between childhood and adulthood. What do you do with that knowledge? What do you do when you find out that the adults in your life are no better at handling/navigating their lives than the teenagers they are trying to raise? What do you do when you find out that their lives are as miserable and chaotic as yours?
The lies we tell others and ourselves, when others ask us how we are, how our lives are going. How many people really answer honestly? We do so with those few people we love and trust, with our closest friends. We know we can trust them to listen to us without judging us, without abandoning us. That is a rarity in a world that seeks to judge (and cancel) another immediately without knowing or being interested in the facts. Of course we can ask, what is the truth? Is your side of a story truer than mine? We all lie to ourselves to some extent; we do so in order to deal with each day. We tell ourselves that our spouses and children are better than those of others we know, but the reality is otherwise. All families have problems, perhaps the same types of problems but to varying degrees. All families have squabbles, some have real fights, and some are on the outs with other family members for entire lifetimes. We may not have much of a relationship with a sibling, but we say that he or she has a busy life and we talk to them when we can. A spouse may not be all that involved in the family life at home, and we make the same excuse--he or she has a demanding job that keeps him or her busy. Those who are workaholics know that they are overworking to avoid something else in their lives, perhaps an unhappy home life, and those who are diehard alcoholics, drug addicts and overeaters tell themselves that they have their addictions under control, that they can quit drinking, doing drugs, or overeating any time they want. But deep down inside, they know the truth; they can't quit overworking, drinking to excess, doing drugs, or overeating, not without help and a lot of motivation to change. Lying to ourselves, even just a little, helps to mitigate the intensity of our problems. And for most of us, it does; we get through each day without major calamities ensuing. But for those with serious problems, those problems just get worse.
It might not be a good thing if we were always honest about our thoughts and feelings in relation to others. Little white lies help us survive in what could be awkward situations with loved ones. We do our best to be truthful, but sometimes you have to weigh the situation and ask yourself if others (or you yourself) can tolerate hearing the truth or the answers to the questions they've asked. I think of those I know with health problems; is it better for them to hear that their overall prognosis could be good if they do this or that, rather than dismal because of the type of illness they have or because of one's hereditary tendencies? Nobody wants to be told straight out that they are going to die in a few months or years. And if people are told that, they often want to consider themselves the outliers--those few who fall outside the norm. Can you blame people for thinking this way? I think we are hotwired to think this way to some degree, due to the idea of self-preservation and the instinct for survival. We lie to ourselves in the hope that it will turn out alright. And sometimes it does.
Saturday, March 6, 2021
Elena Ferrante's The Lying Life of Adults
I begin Elena Ferrante's novels with a mixture of
fascination and dread. Fascination, because everything I've read by her has
gripped me. Her novels are riveting and her words flow on the pages, moving me
along and immersing me in her Italy, her Naples, and her family dramas that she
has carefully constructed. Dread, because I know that this immersion will stir
up the mud in my own life and memory; it will murky the waters that I think are
so clear, and yet when I dive deeper, I know they aren't.
How is it that one person, one writer, can speak to me and
to so many people at the same time? She has an uncanny way of getting right to
the core of what drives families apart and what keeps them together. She
describes the behaviors, utterances and dramas that comprise the push and pull
of family life, mostly without judging them, and that is where the fear comes
in. Because you know that the behaviors she writes about are real and often violent
to the spirit and body. Sometimes she judges them, but only within the contexts
of her characters, the ones who want to escape the oppression, claustrophobia,
and violence of family life. She allows them to judge, and we follow their
attempts to escape, which are seemingly successful, but we know that somewhere
down the line, the past will knock on their door and demand its due. At some
point, they will face the same situations that they ran from, and come face to
face with their early selves—the ones who said that they would never tolerate
this or that behavior, the ones who said that they would never behave like
their parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents. They experience the human
frailties, deceptions, betrayals, frustrations, rage, and even violence
(psychological and physical) that can be part of family life. The characters in
her books are flawed human beings, like we all are. Perhaps that is part of her
appeal. She explains some parts of our lives for us; I know she does that for
me. I finish her novels thinking, yes, that helps to explain this or that
family member’s behavior, or utterances, or bizarre points of view.
Everyone lies in Ferrante’s novels. Adults lie, but so do
children and teenagers. The Lying Life of
Adults is really the story of how teenagers become adults who lie to
themselves and to others. It is the story of how we become the adults we
profess to hate. Giovanna, the main character who is a teenager, is acutely aware
of the hypocritical behavior of the adults in her life. She has two friends she
confides in, Angela and Ida, the daughters of her parents’ friends Mariano and
Costanza. Her attempt to develop a relationship with her hated aunt Vittoria,
her father’s sister, has far-reaching repercussions for her parents, her
parents’ friends, involved children, and her own life. Vittoria is a destructive
force of nature. She is (presumably) the opposite of Giovanna’s educated, intellectual
and refined father, Andrea, who hates his coarse uneducated sister (the feeling
is mutual), and yet, that is what Ferrante wants to show us, that at their
core, both Vittoria and Andrea are the same. They are egotists and liars, they
think nothing of destroying others’ lives by wanting what they want (Vittoria
wanted Enzo--the husband of her friend Margherita, and Andrea wanted Costanza—the
wife of his friend Mariano). They justify their betrayals of spouses and
families and lie to themselves about how ‘noble’ their intentions are. Nella,
Andrea’s wife, is crushed by his betrayal and their eventual divorce, but tries
to live her life following the divorce as best she can. Mariano, who has
cheated on Costanza often, is also lost; eventually Nella and Mariano find each
other despite Nella’s protests to the contrary. Giovanna is witness to all of these
happenings. At the same time, she becomes friends with Vittoria (who worshipped
Enzo), Margherita, and Margherita’s children (Corrado, Tonino, and
Giuliana). Vittoria dominates Margherita and her children’s lives; she tells
them how to live and what to do and not to do. The relationship between
Vittoria and Margherita is strange and one I found hard to understand, but for
the purposes of the book, I accepted it. But I know very few people in real
life who would have become friends with their husbands’ mistresses.
Vittoria brought to the surface memories of my father’s eldest
sister Carmela, who was also not much-liked in my family. Unlike Vittoria, she
was considered to be good-looking; she was a refined woman with many intellectual
and cultural interests. But she was a drama queen, and no family gathering ever
ended pleasantly when she was present. She was unhappily married to one of my
father’s childhood friends, which didn’t help matters. My father probably felt
pressured to take sides, and he took his sister’s side against his friend. My
mother and my aunt did not get along at all; my mother found her domineering,
controlling, and nosy. Carmela and her husband eventually divorced; she lived
alone afterward until she died, but did have a lover whom she could have married
but chose not to. After one too many unpleasant family gatherings when we were
children, my father and mother decided not to see her anymore, and by
extension, we were not to see her either. After my father died, my sister and I
made an effort to re-establish contact with her. We found her to be a decent
person, but of course by that time she was old and in a different frame of
mind. I think she was happy to see us again, but our lives were busy and we
didn’t see her often. She died eight years after my father.
I could relate to those feelings that Ferrante describes—remaining
loyal to parents while wondering why we all couldn’t just get along, and feeling guilty for wanting to have some kind of relationship with my aunt. My aunt
made an effort to remember our birthdays with gifts and cards, but they were
never well-received, and eventually she ceased to make the effort. I remember
when my grandmother died, I was around twelve or so. Frustrations and anger
came to the surface, people said things they probably regretted, and the war
only intensified. It was difficult to deal with all those feelings as a child. But
I knew even then that this kind of family life was oppressive and
claustrophobic, and I wanted no part of it. And for the most part, I have
managed to escape it, but not without many mistakes and poor decisions of my
own before I got to a place in life with which I could be comfortable. Reading
Ferrante reminds me of my early family life, and it’s a mixed blessing, as I
wrote at the beginning of this post—I am fascinated by what she manages to stir
up in me, and fearful of it at the same time. Like a moth to the flame, as the
old saying goes. I know I will get burned. Unlike the moth, I survive being
burned, but it is a strange experience nonetheless.
Monday, May 21, 2018
Reflections on Elena Ferrante's Troubling Love
Friday, March 27, 2020
My Brilliant Friend is a brilliant HBO series
So, in these strange and apocalyptic times, what have I been doing for enjoyment? Once my work is done for the day, I watch the brilliant, moving, riveting Italian series on HBO--My Brilliant Friend. I wrote a long post in February 2019 about this series of four books, the Neapolitan quadrilogy, by Elena Ferrante: https://paulamdeangelis.blogspot.com/search?q=elena+ferrante . They haunt me to this day, and the HBO series will haunt me for the rest of my life--it is that perfect. Never before have I experienced a film or series that captures so perfectly the books on which they are based. I watch the series (so far books 1 and 2--My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name--have been filmed) and it feels so real--this is what it must have been like to grow up in Lila and Elena's small neighbourhood in Naples in the 1950s. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give the HBO series a 10. Like the books, it evokes something so utterly visceral and primal in me; it is phenomenally well-acted. I feel like I am right there with the characters--in their homes, on the dusty streets of the neighbourhood, at school, hanging out with friends in the neighbourhood or at the beach on Ischia, and experiencing the angst and pain of first love and rejection. All the actors and actresses are superlative; the two young girls who play the preteen Lila and Elena (Ludovica Nasti and Elisa del Genio) are incredible, as are the actresses who play the teenage Lila and Elena (Gaia Girace and Margherita Mazzucco). I cannot imagine the actresses themselves not being affected by the parts they play. It would be interesting to hear their thoughts on the series. I hope there will be a season 3 and 4 so that all the books are covered. It will only get more interesting from hereon in. I know it takes time to produce the series; season 1 came out in 2018 and season 2 in 2020; if all goes according to plan, perhaps season 3 will show up in 2022 and season 4 in 2024. I hope the current pandemic doesn't delay the filming for too long, I read yesterday that the virus is now rampaging through the south of Italy. We'll see what the future brings. In any case, I can wholeheartedly recommend this series, and the music soundtrack by Max Richter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W14_WJatKSE
Monday, February 13, 2023
The miserable lives of the literati
Wednesday, April 27, 2022
My blog posts about My Brilliant Friend
For those of you who are just now discovering the HBO series My Brilliant Friend, I can say that you are in for a real treat. I've watched all three seasons to date; the fourth season has been announced and production is underway, with new actresses to play the parts of Elena and Lila. I'm very much looking forward to the new season. The series is directed by Saverio Costanzo, Alice Rohrwacher, and Daniele Luchetti. And if you want to start with the books by Elena Ferrante on which the series is based, you can find them on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Here are two posts I wrote in 2019 and 2020 about the books and the series respectively; I'm posting them again today:
A New Yorker in Oslo: My Brilliant Friend is a brilliant HBO series (paulamdeangelis.blogspot.com)
Saturday, February 19, 2022
Men who leave and men who stay
We're back in Elena Ferrante territory today. Apologies to her for paraphrasing one of the book titles in her Neapolitan quadrilogy--Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. I finished Days of Abandonment today; it was written in 2002, prior to the Neapolitan quadrilogy. The latter books are more riveting than Days of Abandonment, but Days of Abandonment has its riveting moments as well.
Men don't come off very well in Ferrante's books. They are mostly sexual predators at heart, constantly looking at other women, faithless, disloyal, and uncaring opportunists. They are not child-friendly nor are they really interested in family life. As Olga in Days of Abandonment says to Mario, who has abandoned her and their two children for a woman almost half his age (Carla), "you are an opportunist and a traitor". Which he is. Unfortunately he is not much more than that as written by Ferrante. The book is really about Olga and her breakdown after he leaves her. She must cope with all of the mess while taking care of her two children Gianni and Ilaria and the family dog Otto. She doesn't do a very good job of any of it and she knows it. Her identity unravels and she is forced to do the work of finding out who she is at the age of thirty-eight. She doesn't particularly like what she sees--a woman who gave up her writing career and her identity to marry Mario and have children. The roles of wife and mother became her identities. She thought her marriage was happy; perhaps it was. Even if marriages are happy, one partner can always be unfaithful and stay in the marriage, or be unfaithful and leave. Mario does both, actually. He starts his affair with Carla when she is still a teenager and leaves Olga for her when Carla turns twenty. He closes the door on one life and begins another. He does not tell Olga where he is or with whom he is living. She doesn't even get to know where he is living and does not find out about Carla until midway through the book. And then all the pieces come together for her. The description of her breakdown is disturbing and uncomfortable, perhaps as it should be, but it dragged on too long for my taste. Otto dies after being poisoned with something he ate that was laced with strychnine while Olga was out walking him in the park. Her son Gianni becomes ill with a high fever. She feels like she is falling apart. But this experience made its point. 'The only way out is through'. By the time Olga has gotten through it, she discovers she no longer loves Mario. It's as though she has stepped outside her own life and become an observer. She watches as her children visit Mario and meet Carla, she listens as they praise Carla, she eventually deals with Mario adult to adult, she reclaims her identity as a writer, she listens to him complain that his children will ruin his relationship with Carla, and she finds that she really doesn't care about any of it. She understands that Mario is an opportunist and a traitor and tells him that. She no longer needs him. In other words, she grew up. She grew out of a stale banal marriage that her husband abandoned years ago in secret. She stepped out from under Mario's shadow. The patriarchal dominance that has ruled her life for so long is gone. She finds that she does not want to date or be social or be with other men, at least not if she has no say in how these events are to happen. But eventually she starts an affair with the older musician who lives below her and that is how the book ends. She is nearly forty and she is writing again. The rest of it is just the life around her in all its messiness and discomfort. She learns to live with both. Days of Abandonment is an angry book, but the anger is directed both at Mario and at herself for giving up so much of herself. No one asked her to do that; she chose the prison of the wife/mother identity and became entrapped. She could have continued writing, she could have insisted that Mario help more with the children. So many things she should have done, but she didn't. She tries to understand why Mario left her, and discovers that she really didn't know him. She constructed the idea of a happy marriage around them; his idea of what their marriage was did not seem to interest her. Or if it did, she ignored his attempts to break free. But in any case, nothing she could have done would have kept Mario from straying. He was a man who leaves, not one who stays.
There is autobiographical content in her novels to be sure. Exactly where, in which novels, remains a mystery and that's fine with me. Ferrante writes under a pseudonym for reasons that only she alone knows. This places most of the focus on the stories, where it should be. But after having read a number of her books--the Neapolitan quadrilogy, Troubling Love, Days of Abandonment, and The Lying Life of Adults, it seems to me that she has dealt with a number of emotional and psychological issues (traumas?) that have preoccupied her throughout her life, through her writing. Men cannot be trusted to be faithful since they leave their wives for other (often younger) women. Love is mostly about sexual bonding and less about loyalty and empathy. Mothers and daughters have volatile relationships; mothers love their daughters but are also jealous of them, particularly if the daughters have the chance to pursue higher education while they did not. The relationships between mothers and children generally are also precarious; they are fraught with frustration, weariness, irritation and real anger in addition to the maternal bond of love. Ferrante makes it clear that children change everything in a marriage, for better and/or for worse. Her ambivalence about the roles of wife and mother is clear throughout her writing. She has no qualms about bringing up the 'worse'--being chained to these small beings who demand attention and love, the banality of childcare, the reduction of woman's role to wife and mother and not much else. Ferrante is an Italian novelist but her novels are international bestsellers, which is illustrative of just how relevant her themes are on a global level. The interesting thing is that Days of Abandonment was written in 2002; it could have been written in the 1970s, when the women's movement was dealing with many of the same issues--women's identities, self-realization, marriage versus single life, having children or not. It tells me that the issues that women face now are not so much different than those they faced in the 1970s or those that our mothers faced in their generation. Men left their wives and children back in the 1950s and 1960s too, for many of the same reasons as they do now. If you ask them directly, they will answer selfishly. They want a woman who is sexually exciting, who is interested in sex. They want a woman who pays attention to them. What they want is often at odds with what they get from marriage and family, where there is often limited time for both sex and personal attention. And so it goes. As long as couples have children and children become the focus of marriage, there will always be men who leave and men who stay. And perhaps women who leave and women who stay. Perhaps it's worth repeating that one should choose one's life partner carefully and marry a person who is faithful and loving. But how do you know that when you marry? How can you be sure of how the future will turn out? You can't, so you do the best you can and commit to the choice you make. How it turns out is often the stuff of novels.
Monday, May 17, 2021
Reflections on anonymity
Tuesday, February 15, 2022
My Brilliant Friend and The Gilded Age
Both My Brilliant Friend and The Gilded Age are currently streaming on HBO Max, and I have to say that I am immensely glad for that. Both series make for a perfect streaming experience in the midst of the wasteland that linear television has become. Linear television is a joke; there is nothing of real value being offered for viewers. Bad reality tv has won out completely; most shows have no substance and no real value and are quickly forgotten. What happened to tv shows like Everyone Loves Raymond, Seinfeld, King of Queens, The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Friends, and The X-Files to name just a few of the shows that were popular during the 1990s and early 2000s? I could continue, but it would be pointless, because it's unlikely that linear tv will ever invest in quality programming again. If there were no streaming channels, I'd quit watching tv altogether.
That's not to say that everything on Netflix or HBO is of high quality. It's not. Many of the crime series on Netflix are trashy and easily forgettable. I have become much more selective about the crime series I watch; I simply don't want my mind contaminated by a continual rehashing of the same themes--rape, revenge, gratuitous violence, and so on. Women are nearly always the victims of rape and gratuitous violence. It gets repetitive after a while. Then there are the psycho films; woman meets man, woman marries man, man has a secret life/lover/past and a tendency toward violence. Woman ends up being the abused person until she grows a pair and fights back. I could write this stuff in my sleep.
Thank God for the good series like My Brilliant Friend and The Gilded Age. I've written about My Brilliant Friend before (A New Yorker in Oslo: My Brilliant Friend is a brilliant HBO series (paulamdeangelis.blogspot.com); I've read the entire Neapolitan quartet by Elena Ferrante and seen the first two seasons of My Brilliant Friend on HBO. Season 3 is now being shown and the quality of this season is just as good as the first two seasons. For me it is a perfect tv show; when I watch it I am transported to the world as it was in Naples Italy during the 1960s, a time when there was a lot of political upheaval and societal changes. The acting is excellent, likewise the storylines and the sets. I recommend the series for anyone looking for quality entertainment and a show that you will not easily forget.
The Gilded Age was an era in US history extending from 1870 until around 1910. The HBO series focuses on the opulent lives of the New York City elite in the 1880s and the clash between 'old wealth' and 'new wealth'. The series is the creation of Julian Fellowes who was the creator, writer and executive producer of the multiple award-winning ITV series Downton Abbey (2010–2015) (info from Wikipedia). It has a Downton Abbey feel to it, but transferred to the fast-moving society of Manhattan. It is quality tv all the way, with very good storylines, sets, and acting. It mostly shows the rich as rather petty, snobby and vindictive, in other words, it's a soap opera offering quality entertainment. I've watched four episodes so far and am hooked.
Wednesday, March 23, 2022
2018 - Max Richter - My Brilliant Friend (OST)
Out In The Country by Three Dog Night
Out in the Country by Three Dog Night is one of my favorite songs of all time. When I was in high school and learning how to make short mov...