Ferrante

 To practice Italian and also just to read more fiction I've read about half of a novel of Ferrante, La vita bugiarda...  After Almudena Grandes it was refreshing to read someone who narrates a bit more concisely. Nevertheless, I am already a bit bored by this one. 

A 13-year old girl, Giovanni, starts not doing as well as she should in school. Both her parents are teachers and her father is kind of local intellectual figure. She overhears her father say that she is just like Aunt Vittoria. This is wounding, because her parents hate Vittoria, her father's sister. So she goes and seeks out her Aunt. The Aunt has a totally different version: it is her parents who are the awful people, bookish snobs who look down on uneducated people. She meets the widow and the children of Enzo, the man who was the Aunt's lover, and gets immersed in a world where people aren't well educated and speak Neapolitan dialect instead of Italian. 

Then it turns out that her father is in love with another woman, who is also the mother of the narrator's two best friends, and her parents divorce. She wavers back and forth between her parents and her aunt. There is a long story about a bracelet, that belonged to the grandmother, than was passed on to Vittoria, should have been for the 13-year old narrator, but ends up in the hands of the father's lover, who then gives it back the narrator, who then gives it back to Vittoria, who then gives it back to the daughter of the widow, who is engaged to Roberto, a handsome man from Milan that the narrator (by now she is almost 15) is also in love with. I got sick of hearing about the damned bracelet over hundreds of pages. At one point someone points out that it is a symbol.  Well, duh. 

There is a lot of potentially interesting narrative material here. There is some amount of mystery and suspense, but mostly everything is out there on the surface. The prose style is mundane, as far as I can tell, since I don't know Italian to have a super fine discernment about this. We hear about the dialect but never get any of it, so the language is super homogenous and a bit bland. The characterization is so-so. Vittoria is a vivid figure, but many of the others are not well-drawn. The narrator herself is contradictory, so she is not a flat figure, but the different parts of her don't quite coalesce into a single character. The city of Naples comes alive in the book for someone who hasn't ever been there. 

There is some intelligence in the young girl. She reads the "Vangeli" as a way of trying to impress Roberto and wonders why Jesus's miracles are trivial ones, ones that don't help humanity as a whole.  

In short, it's the typical mediocre realist fiction.