Posted in 8-2013 Reviews, Historical, Italy on Sep 2nd, 2013
When Elena Ferrante created her long epic about the women in Naples as they faced major cultural changes from the early 1950s to the present, it was issued in installments as three separate books. My Brilliant Friend, the first installment, released in 2012, focuses on a broad spectrum of Neapolitan life in the 1950s, and this year’s volume, The Story of a New Name, focuses on the same families and main characters as they continue their lives into the 1960s. Readers of My Brilliant Friend, will remember from the Prologue to that novel, that Elena Greco, then sixty-six and living in Turin, received a long-distance telephone call in 2010 from the son of Lila Cerullo, once her best friend, asking for help in locating his mother, who disappeared from Naples two weeks before. Out of touch with Lila for years, Elena is convinced, based on past experience, that the dramatic and spontaneous Lila does not wish to be found, and she decides to write down everything she can remember of Lila and her life from her birth in 1944 to 2010. The trilogy which results recounts the life of Lila and illustrates her own long relationship with her as a child and young woman, their two lives intertwining but moving in dramatically different directions in the course of the action. At over eight hundred pages for the first two volumes, this trilogy is truly epic in length, and in its depiction of Naples in the aftermath of war, primarily in My Brilliant Friend, it adds epic themes and ideas. In this second novel, however, the novel focuses more specifically on the minutiae of their daily lives, especially their turbulent love lives.
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The adult characters in My Brilliant Friend share their lives in an economically depressed community on the fringes of Naples in the early 1950s, people who are still traumatized by the war and the disasters, both personal and financial, that have resulted from it. Like their children, they live in the moment – passionately, emotionally, and often violently. They have intermarried over the years, and their children play together and will also, in all likelihood, marry each other. The bulk of the novel details Elena Greco’s relationship with Lila Cerullo from the time they are six years old in the early 1950s. Elena is a conscientious student and works hard, but Lila, who is incorrigible in her behavior, is an instinctive student who taught herself how to read when she was three. Between the beginning and the end of this novel, when the two friends are sixteen, author Elena Ferrante creates a vivid picture of Neapolitan life from the early 1950s to the early 1960s as times change and people must either change, too, or be left behind. Both women are aware from the outset that it is the men of the family who determine one’s social class and who control virtually every aspect of family life. The competition for “appropriate” suitors within their small neighborhood, as the girls in the neighborhood reach puberty, becomes fierce. This well-developed family saga is the first of a trilogy, which continues up to the present. Well done narrative with wide appeal.
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Maurizio de Giovanni’s newest novel, The Crocodile, is not part of the Commissario Ricciardi series, though the book is dedicated to “Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi, and the souls in darkness,” and frankly, I wondered how the author would ever succeed in creating a new “hero” to rival Ricciardi, one of the most intriguing and imaginative “heroes” in noir fiction. I wondered, too, if a setting in contemporary Naples could possibly be as atmospheric as that of Naples in the 1930s. I should have had more faith. Without even a backward glance, de Giovanni has created yet another brilliantly realized protagonist, Inspector Giuseppe Lojacono – equally lonely, equally wounded by life, equally sympathetic, and at least as intriguing as Ricciardi, though from a very different background. Lojacono, from Sicily, is fully familiar with the workings of organized crime there, and he has recently become a victim of its machinations. A low level crook in Sicily turned state’s witness and identified the innocent Lojacono as an informant for organized crime. Instantly Lojacono became a pariah in the police department. Sicily shipped him off the island to Naples, which took him in but did not want him. The author succeeds in making this as much of a character novel as it is a novel of dark and violent crime. Ultimately, readers who are already familiar with Maurizio de Giovanni’s work will be thrilled to see the author branching out and taking new chances, even as they thrill with the information that the fourth book of the year will be the third installment of the brilliant Commissario Ricciardi tetralogy.
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Baron Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi di Malomonte, Commissario of Public Safety at the Royal Police Headquarters in Naples, is a lonely man. Growing up as the orphaned child of a wealthy family, he has been living with his Tata Rosa ever since. With a natural shyness that is close to terror when it comes to women, the thirty-year-old Ricciardi’s only real “friend” is his deputy, Brigadier Raffaele Maione, in whom he confides nothing about his private life. With his life secure because of his wealth, Ricciardi does not fear losing his job, but he often goes his own way in investigations if he feels justice will be better served. He has no fear of his department’s higher-ups, most of whom walk a fine line to avoid embarrassing government officials who, in 1931, are closely associated with Mussolini and his Fascists. Set in 1931 in the Sanita area of Naples, an area in which many families are eking out a living through long hours of work at service jobs, the author introduces a series of characters whose lives further develop during the novel but do not always overlap with each other, their stories often moving along separately with occasional connections to Ricciardi and Maione. By the time Ricciardi is called to investigate the gory murder of Carmela Calise, the fortune teller and money lender, Maione has already started to investigate the slashing and disfiguring of the beautiful Filomena Russo, who refuses to talk. As Ricciardi investigates, the case becomes broader, and he finds himself challenging his superiors.
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In his masterful portrayal of Michelangelo’s four-year effort to fill the 12,000 square foot, vaulted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with new frescoes for Pope Julius II, a commission Michelangelo had tried to avoid, Ross King examines and places in context the known details of Michelangelo’s life, the images he includes in the frescoes, and his relationship with Pope Julius II, called the “terrifying Pope,” a man who is thought, ironically, to have been much like Michelangelo himself in personality. This was a tumultuous and monumental era artistically, one in which Pope Julius II tore down the existing St. Peter’s Basilica and started a completely new cathedral, created new papal apartments and a library, planned an immense tomb for himself, and determined to have the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel frescoed in a way which would confer even greater status upon himself and the church. This vibrant and exciting atmosphere offered Michelangelo and his contemporaries many opportunities for work, but competition was fierce, artists were always at the mercy of their patrons, and they didn’t have much, if any, choice in their subject matter, a fact that author King stresses in the book’s title. Set in 1508 – 1512, this book is an exciting depiction of life for artists more than five hundred years ago.
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