Bilingualism in Ferrante

Elena is in Pisa now; her Italian is very literary and yet inflected by her Neopolitan dialect; people from other regions of Italy make fun of her. One girl from Rome mocks her accent, and then accuses here later of stealing money from her. Elena slaps her hard and spits out a rebuke in dialect. The Roman girl apologizes later. Generally, though, Elena tries to ingratiate herself with her classmates and professors.  She has a Communist or Troskyite boyfriend, or male friend maybe, and goes to Paris with him, but he fails his exams and disappears. It is about 1963 / 64 by now. 

The presence of dialetto is strong in this novel, but we get almost none of it, maybe a dozen words in the whole book. We are simply told that somebody says something in dialect, but the words we see are an Italian, or a paraphrase. This is because the book is written for a larger audience, nationally and internationally. In Italian the presence of dialect would be off-putting; in translation is would be lost anyway. As a consequence the novel reads rather blandly.  Of course, I don't know a word of the dialect myself, so this makes the novel far easier to read. One marker of dialect, though, is the variation in nicknames. Elena is Lenu, Lenuccia, or Elena. Lina is sometimes Lila. 

Now we get an account of Lina and Nino's love affair, that the narrator cannot really know in this level of detail: the first-person narration shifts inexplicably to third-person omniscient. Now Lina is pregnant with Nino's child, and planning to leave the abusive Stefano. 

Generally, we have good story, with great narrative potential, with the main tension being the contrast between the reduced world of the neighborhood and of Naples, and the larger world of more educated people. The dialect is the marker of the rione, and standard Italian / Tuscan is the marker of the larger world where people are interested in politics and literature. Lina  is stuck in this neighorhood world, and not even Nino can rescue her from it, since how he is not studying as much spending all his energy being a passionate and obsessive lover to Lina. Elena has escaped Naples, but really doesn't now who she is yet, or how to make her way through 

The weakness of the novel is a kind of stylistic blandness and a propensity to tell rather than show. Also, a lack of narrative economy. I like the Balzacian scope, but I think a Balzac novel moves along faster.