Those who leave and those who stay

Just finished the third of Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels.  Greco, the narrator, is constantly yearning for a quiet space, away from competition.  The sense is that you can only make art in such a quiet space.  But it seems there’s no interaction between people without one striving to fuck, thwart, or destroy the other.   So maybe no quiet space exists, though Greco again and again almost seems to find it.  Ferrante puts the football down in front of her, Ferrante pulls it away.  And you’re surprised every time.

Ferrante and juxtaposition

Most of the way through the third of Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, Those Who Leave And Those Who Stay.  A central figure is the juxtaposition.  The special power that an artist has, in Ferrante, is to put things beside each other which are not ordinarily beside each other; or, to put it another way, to place distant entities into contact.  But it’s inevitable that the ability to do so also makes natural boundaries more permeable.  It becomes more difficult to keep what’s inside separate from what’s outside.  This creates problems.

The Story of a New Name

2016 reading project is to have more than half my reading be books in translation.  So far this has translated into reading Ferrante after Ferrante.  Not really feeling equal to the task of writing about these books, which color everything else around them while you read.  The struggle to be the protagonist of your own story.  Gatsby is a snapshot of it, Ferrante is a movie of it.