The words piled like particles
a termite mound of child-world, a nest
of loves and fears, no choices,
the hands of those who might be
friends. The dark stairs,
the cellar gratings, the railings,
the women washing the steps.
The story of the climb, one
step and a halt, wait, the
friend has strayed, is stuck;
oh, she has gone ahead, hurry,
catch her, move that foot,
Get up!
The story was anger and anxiety,
the thwarted desire to be loved.
The story was slapping and punching,
an attack with a metal bar, a car,
A dangerous white car, and a red car
taking a slow route to the cage.
***
The author writes in Italian. The Italians use a lot more words than the British. They can use a vast number of words to say the same thing, seemingly without repeating themselves exactly. So I liken the words to the particles in a termite mound. The writer seems to feel a great desire to narrate the whole "truth" and leave out no detail that might be germane to the story.
This book tells the story of a girl who is the most gifted of her family, and because it's the 20th century, post 2nd world war, it is not impossible for her to make progress, through education, away from her humble neighbourhood in Naples. But she has a friend who is like a mirror - equally intelligent, perhaps even more gifted, whose story is entwined with hers, but is very different. Their lives are enmeshed in a neighbourhood of other families and these people come in and out of their stories.
At this time, a girl might sense that her mother is more ignorant than herself and have very clear ambitions to use her talents to go further. The parents have to be prevailed upon to be selfless, and who does the prevailing? The teacher. The local teacher was given extraordinary respect and influence, which seems to have gone now. But for this girl, the interference of the local primary teacher changed her life. But in her extraordinary progress she makes many mistakes which she might not have made if she had respected her mother enough to confide in her, or trusted another woman. But she comes from a neighbourhood where trust is uncommon.
(Now I think, as a child I wanted to know more than my mother. These days the children don't want to know as much as their parents, which is terribly sad. They seem to prefer to skate along the surface of life rather than know how to analyse and question, or how to mend things that are broken. They do not like to be self-critical. )
One of the interesting motivations for the narrator's progress is her capacity to compare her own efforts with those of others - even the chatty letter she writes from her teenage holiday is compared with shame to the well-written reply that her friend writes. In short, she is self-critical and at times feels ashamed and discouraged, but always she learns from her friends and makes every effort to come up to their level.
Even while the girls are very young there is a murder in the neighbourhood. The man whom their fathers hate is killed. They know details of the killing almost as though they had been witnesses. As the girls grown up they learn the way the neighbourhood works: that some of their social circle have money and power and some have neither, that there is a pecking order as vigorously - and viciously - maintained as that of a wolf pack, and they have to decide whether they want to remain within the pack - the pack being all the men they know - or take their chances elsewhere. We discover that Italians don't pay their taxes because they don't worry about the government - they have enough to worry about in the form of a local organisation called the Camorra.
What is wonderful is that this series of books is being taken seriously by most critics, while formerly traditional male critics would have dismissed it out of hand as being interesting only to "women's studies".
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