The New Last Name (cont)

 I'm about half way through this novel by Ferrante. My reading Italian is getting halfway decent. Now the main characters are at a beach community outside of Naples, possibly an island. The doctor has recommended that Lina / Lila get sun and surf to help her get pregnant, and she takes the narrator Elena / Linu with her. Linu is in love with Nino, who is now a university student. Lina borrows the complete theater of Beckett from Elena, and talks to Nino about it. He is impressed, even though he is not into literature.  It turns out Nino is in love with Lina, from the elementary school days, and tries to kiss her one day on the beach. She resists at first but a few chapters later they are in love with each other, to Elena's dismay. They enlist Elena help to spend the night together in a neighboring village, deceiving Lina's mother, who is staying with them at the beach house.  

There is a conversation about getting pregnant. Lina says she will not get pregnant with Nino because he will use a 'preservative." What's that? A thing he puts on down there (a condom). The young women have never heard of this. Plus, Lina / Lila doesn't think she can get pregnant anyway.  

Nino's friend Bruno is in love with Elena, but she isn't attracted to him. He comes from a rich family, so he mother would be overjoyed if she were with Bruno. Stefano's pregnant sister is also in love with Bruno, and has returned to Naples in order to remain faithful to her husband.  

For me the pacing of the novel is very slow, and the plot a little soap-operish. It's a bildungsroman, with Elena trying to find her path in life. Her main relationship is with Lina, her closest female friend. Her literary and intellectual vocation is emerging through her reading. Lina is highly intelligent (the amica geniale of the first novel in this series) but only has an elementary education. Elena is beautiful but doesn't know, it. Nino's father, a poet, tells her this. She has nerdy glasses and is too poor to dress herself well.  

I can understand why this sort of thing is popular. I'm not a particularly patient reader of realist fiction, and I know this novelist appeals more to women.  (Women read much more than men anyway.) So if it holds my interest it must be pretty good. It evokes a particular moment in history, with earnest young people talking about the atomic bomb and the human condition, Beckett, etc...