The fourth volume of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet brings her ambitious project to a triumphant, satisfying, baffling and unsettling conclusion, coming full circle with an epilogue called “Restitution”. But we find no such thing. Nothing is restored: we battle on, through old age, to the end. There is no peace, no reconciliation, no end to the power struggles and convulsions of sex and politics. These are volcanic novels. They pay tribute to the brooding presence of an unstable Vesuvius, overlooking a Naples part mythic, part historic and part intensely real – a Naples of casual and concerted violence, of squalor and sudden death, of earth tremors, of long, tedious queues at the post office, of surprisingly orderly public libraries, of pizza and ice cream, of grand buildings and grand views over ever-changing seas.
It is hard to find a critical vocabulary to contain what has been going on in Ferrante’s work. The first volume, My Brilliant Friend, appears on one level to be a Bildungsroman, taking us through the impoverished but aspiring childhood and schooldays of the narrator/novelist Elena Greco and her alter ego, her frighteningly fierce and unpredictable friend Lina Cerullo. They are surrounded by a large cast of children and adults from the working-class district of “the neighbourhood” and its thoroughfare, the stradone, whose love affairs, careers and entanglements are played out in the fourth book. But the sweep of the narrative is prefaced at the opening of book one by the disappearance of the now old and adult Lina, an event that provides a kind of closure to the final volume. So the entire sequence, published over a period of less than five years, must, one must suppose, have been carefully planned in advance. Motifs and images are followed through, at times perhaps too insistently: Elena’s mother’s silver bracelet makes several portentous appearances and the dolls Nu and Tina, which the two six-year-old girls lose at the beginning of the narrative, are carefully re-created in Elena’s and Lina’s youngest children, their daughters Imma and Tina. The foreshadowed theme of the bambina perduta is melodramatically enacted in real life. But, as Ferrante convinces us, real Naples is full of real melodrama.
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