Today is not one of my “Twelve days of Translated Fiction”
entries, it is simply another translated review of a novel I recently finished
and I thought it timely to blog my thoughts given yesterday I posted book two
of the Neapolitan series “The Story of a New Name” as my eighth favourite
translated book of 2014.
“Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay” is book three in the “Neapolitan
Novels” series and was released in September this year and follows the opener “My
Brilliant Friend”, the story of the girl’s teenage years in “The Story of a New
Name” and will be finalised with the release of book four, the final instalment will
be coming to us from Europa Editions on 1 September 2015. I must admit I was eager to attack this work after the
first two instalments and am actually a little surprised at myself for taking
three months to get to it.
Our story continues the relationship between Lila (Lina or
even Raffaella) and our narrator, writer Elena (Lenu or Lenuccia) this time as
twenty (thirty?) something’s. Only fourteen pages in and we are straight back
into the over bearing nature of Lila, with Elena’s long secret love, Nino,
asking after her:
For a moment I thought I’d been
wrong, that Lila had never gone out of his life, that he had come to the
bookstore not for me but only to find out about her. Then I said to myself: if
he had really wanted to find out about Lila, in so many years he would have
found a way, and I reacted violently, in the sharp tone of someone who wants to
end the subject quickly:
“She left her husband and lives
with someone else.”
“Did she have a boy or a girl?”
“A boy.”
He made a grimace of displeasure
and said: “Lina is brave, even too brave. But she doesn’t know how to submit to
reality, she’s incapable of accepting others and herself. Loving her was a
difficult experience.”
“In what sense?”
“She doesn’t know what dedication
is.”
“Maybe you’re exaggerating.”
“No, she’s really made badly: in
her mind and in everything, even when it comes to sex.”
The first twenty or so pages are a great opening for the
readers of the first two volumes as it lays bare Elena’s loves, her fears, her
longings, her uncertainty, her failings. It is a raw introduction back into her
world.
However, for those unfamiliar with the characters of the
first two novels and the plot that leads up to this work, there is an “Index of
characters and notes on the events of the earlier volumes” at the start of this
book, I feel this work is less of a stand-alone book than the second one was.
Here we have a strong assumption that you understand quite a detailed
background, relationships and emotions as well as the circumstances leading to
the events that transpire. I would suggest you read the earlier works before picking this one up (I read the first two in the incorrect order!!!)
Nino has allegedly fathered many children (although none
with Elena) and the longing for motherhood, her desire to bear children is
also an undercurrent throughout:
What a handsome child: it was a
memorable moment. Mirko charmed me immediately; he had folds of rosy flesh
around his wrists, around his legs. How cute he was, what a nice shape his eyes
had, how much hair, what long delicate feet, what a good smell. I whispered all
those compliments, softly, as I carried him around the house. The voices of the
men faded, as did the ideas they defended and their hostility, and something
happened that was new to me, I felt pleasure. I felt, like an uncontrollable
flame, the child’s warmth, his mobility, and it seemed to me that all my senses
became more vigilant, as if the perception of that perfect fragment of life
that I had in my arms had become achingly acute, and I felt his sweetness and
my responsibility for him, and was prepared to protect him from all the evil
shadows lying in wait in the dark corners of the house. Mirko must have
understood and he was quiet. This, too, gave me pleasure, I was proud of having
been able to give him peace.
Our novel contains a very detailed plot of the
political state of play in Italy at the time with the Communists and Fascists
playing a central role. There is a large section dedicated to Lila’s working
class struggle as she works in a smallgoods factory. Personally I found this
section a little too detailed, our writer explaining too many thoughts and
facts of Lila’s struggle to ring true, given she’d been away for such a long
period of time. Then we have the involvement of the Communist Party in
attempting to sort out the smallgoods factory issues and the trouble that
causes Lila and then the arrival of the Fascists and the further struggles that
adds to the life of a woman who simply wants to feed her child (or does she?)
To be honest I personally found the political themes a
little overbearing, the day to day drudgery of being a wife and a mother a
little too detailed. My personal attraction to the earlier works was the
detailed and open descriptions of these two women’s relationship, as the cover
says “one of modern fiction’s richest portraits of a friendship”, unfortunately
that is lacking in this work:
“You’re strong,” she answered, to
my astonishment. “I have never been. The better and truer you feel, the farther
away you go. If I merely pass through the tunnel of the stradone, I’m scared. Remember when we tried to get to the sea but
it started raining? Which of us wanted to keep going and which of us made an
about-face, you or me?”
Don’t get me wrong, this is still a very fine work, a
history lesson of Naples and Florence at the time, a book where scenes, like
the one above, have you recalling passages from the earlier novels, the
continuing story of Elena’s love for Nino, her marriage and the monotony that
contains, a revelation on the human struggle:
I began to have some ugly
thoughts on the beach. Lila, I said to myself, deliberately pushes away
emotions, feelings. The more I sought tools to try and explain myself to
myself, the more she, on the contrary, hid. The more I tried to draw her into
the open and involve her in my desire to clarify, the more she took refuge in
the shadows. She was like the full moon when to crouches behind the forest and
the branches scribble on its face.
In this work Lila is reduced to mere facts, the emotional
connection has been broken by the tyranny of distance, something I wanted to
continue – but…those who leave….
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