"Tell the truth, Lila."

Background

I've been listening to The Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante. Each novel is ~500 pages. Ferrante has completely enthralled me with her series. I could easily blog about it everyday. See my response to the first novel in the series, My Brilliant Friend here.

Occasionally, there are scenes in the book that I must read. Here is one. It is from the fourth novel titled The Story of the Lost Child. 

Excerpt

“Tell the truth, Lila.”

“The truth.”

I pressed her, often I provoked her, and she reacted but never to the point of losing control and
letting go.

It occurred to me that it was now a linguistic question. She resorted to Italian as if to a barrier; I tried to push her toward dialect, our language of candor. But while her Italian was translated from dialect, my dialect was increasingly translated from Italian, and we both spoke a false language. She needed to explode, lose control of the words. I wanted her to say in the authentic Neapolitan of our childhood: What the fuck do you want, Lenù, I’m like this because I lost my daughter, and maybe she’s alive, maybe she’s dead, but I can’t bear either of those possibilities, because if she’s alive she’s alive far away from me, she’s in a place where horrible things are happening to her, which I see clearly, I see them all day and all night as if they were happening right before my eyes; but if she’s dead I’m dead, too, dead here inside, a death more unbearable than real death, which is death without feeling, while this death forces you to feel everything, every day, to wake up, wash, dress, eat and drink, work, talk to you who don’t understand or won’t understand, to you who even if I just see you, all set, fresh from the hairdresser, with your daughters who do well in school, who always do everything perfectly, who aren’t spoiled even by this place of shit, which, rather, seems to do them good—makes them even more confident, even more arrogant, even more sure they have the right to take everything—all this makes me more furious than I already was: so go, go, leave me in peace, Tina would have been better than all of you, and instead they took her, and I can’t bear it anymore. 

I would have liked to lead her into a conversation like that, jumbled, intoxicated. I felt that if she made up her mind she would extract from the tangled mass of her brain words of that sort. But it didn’t happen. In fact, as I think back, in that phase she was less aggressive than in other periods of our story. Maybe the outburst I hoped for was made up of my own feelings, which therefore hindered me from seeing the situation clearly and made Lila even more elusive. Sometimes I wondered if she had in her mind something unutterable that I wasn’t even capable of imagining. (pages 362-363)

Spoiler Free Analysis

Lenu is the narrator. She wants Lila to open up. Lila is the "Brilliant Friend" from the title of the first novel. The opening pages describe how Lenu is telling the story of their lives and friendship, which started when they were children.

"Tell the truth." A combative phase. Lenu wants Lila to explode. Lila doesn't. The reflective narrator Lenu sees how her aggressiveness may have created the opposite response from Lila. 

Their language is a barrier to truth. The characters are thinking in different languages, Lenu Italian, Lila dialect. They are speaking different languages, Lenu dialect, Lila Italian. both translating. This brings them further from the truth and further from Lenu's goal. The language is a symbol for how distant the characters have traveled, figuratively and metaphorically, from each other.  

Lenu imagines a powerful response. She shifts the narrative from her reflection to the response and perspective she was hoping to get from Lila. In her reflective state, Lenu remembers that Lila is capable of thoughts that Lenu, herself, cannot imagine. Solidifying the greatest barrier between Lenu and Lila, the greatest barrier between Lenu and the truth.

Spoiler Analysis

The series is constantly shifting everything (moods, emotions, attitudes, varying qualities, etc) between Lenu and Lila. Both Lila and Lenu come off as the smarter, wiser, neurotic, selfish, loving, manipulative, naive, and so forth character. The story is told by Lenu, so readers have to trust Lenu to tell the truth. How much of these shifts are shifts in Lenu. 

Then, the author Ferrante, does something brilliant (Ferrante is the ultimate brilliant friend). Lila tells Lenu to never write about her, Lila. Lenu questions Lila. Lila threatens to know and destroy anything Lenu writes about her. The older narrator, Lenu, hints that Lila could be secretly editing, revising, and changing the story that Lenu started writing; the story us, readers, are reading. Damn! Later in the series, Lenu more overtly repeats this suspicion

By the time readers get to the except above, the suspicion and likelihood that Lila is involved in telling the story is high. We can now read "Tell the truth, Lila," as a direct message to Lila from Lenu. Leun may be telling and directing Lila to take over this section of the story.

Lenu is a novelist in the story. Her novels are her life. Characters in the story get upset with her because her novels are too real. Another layer is added. Tell the truth, Lenu!

Conclusion

I really look forward to rereading this series!

I don't want the story to end, it probably will today for me. But, more than any other story, this story has an extremely high reread appeal.

I think I'll reread a chapter a day next year.