The Children's Train

 

The Children's Train: a Novel / Viola Ardone, trans. by Clarissa Botsford, 295 pp.

Based on true events in postwar Italy which saw the transport of Italian children from the impoverished south to families in the wealthier north for temporary or permanent foster care arrangements.  This is the story of Amerigo, a young boy from Naples whose mother is loving but distant and whose father is absent, perhaps in America.  Amerigo doesn't go to school, seldom wears shoes, and is always more or less hungry.  An Italian communist group organizes his journey to a comfortable family in Modena, where he learns to play the violin and excels at school.  His problems arise when it is time to go home and he realizes he no longer knows where he belongs.

Interesting historical fiction which didn't quite grip emotionally.

The Story of the Lost Child: The Fourth and final Neapolitan Novel / Elena Ferrante, trans. Ann Goldstein, 473 p.

Elena returns to Naples with her children.  She returns for a man, but in the end stays for Lila, as she takes a flat in Lila's building.  We see the two women go through the ordinary events of middle age -  raising children, burying parents, drifting away from lovers - and the not-so-ordinary - the murder of childhood friends, the continued impact of organized crime on day-to-day life, and the disappearance of a child.  There are unsolved mysteries here that pull you through the text.  In the end, Elena and Lila felt like my friends, and I hated to say good-bye to them.  An especially gorgeous ending.

The Story of a New Name: Book Two of the Neapolitan Novels / Elena Ferrante, Ann Goldstein, trans., 471 pp.

Lena and Lila's story continues.  Lila has chosen marriage to Stefano and a life helping Stefano and her in-laws run their grocery stores and, now, the shoe factory which has come into being thanks to Lila's design work.  Lena continues studying at a classical high school in Naples, often working 18-hour days at her parents' cramped kitchen table.  Both women are exposed - matter-of-factly - to a shocking level of sexual and other violence, primarily at the hands of men who love them.

Once again Ferrante brings the inner development of two young women to gorgeously vivid life.  The writing is so intelligent, and yet reads like a soap opera that one can't walk away from.  In particular, the long stretch in which the friends vacation together on the beach in Ischia beats any binge TV going, in my view.  I put down number two with one hand and picked up number three with the other.

My Brilliant Friend: Book One: Childhood, Adolescence / Elena Ferrante, 331 pp.

A patron encouraged me to read this, the first in a cycle of four books called the Neapolitan Novels which traces the lives of Lila and Lenu.  Written in an unusual, almost flat style, I kept thinking that the novel was a bit dull.  And yet I kept turning pages and now have the remaining three titles on request.

Lena and Lila are both brilliant, in fact, yet their life paths diverge early.  They are born in 1944 in a Naples neighborhood of bakers, porters, cobblers, and shady characters with ties to the camorra, or crime syndicate, of Naples. Their bond is intense if tumultuous, and occasionally destructive.  This first novel traces their early childhoods through the youthful marriage of one of the two women.

What seems at first to be a simple story becomes increasingly spellbinding as the reader turns pages.  Ferrante shows amazing psychological acuity and has created two unforgettable young women.