My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

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".

A Hard Day's Night

This is the first Beatles film, and I have seen it a number of times. It was on again this week so I had another look at it (it's only an hour and a half long) and I found it interesting enough to find out about it.

Fun with mirrors: John decides he doesn't look a bit like himself: and a great shot of a light reflector too!

I found out that the Beatles did not only suggest the director, Richard Lester, but also the writer. The director had made a short, goonish film with Spike Milligan called the Running, jumping and lying down film, and they liked the style, which is included in the sequence where the Beatles escape from the theatre down the fire escape and start running around a field. It is choreographed but seems like a game, has visual jokes based on confounding expectations. In this scene, Lester took John's place as John was off in London signing his book, In his own Write. After this the style was always included in the Monkees TV Series, which I was more familiar with BEFORE I saw this film, but the film was the origin of the style.

The Beatles also chose the writer, Alun Owen. The screenplay was written by Alun Owen, who was chosen because the Beatles were familiar with his play No Trams to Lime Street, and he had shown an aptitude for Liverpudlian dialogue. McCartney commented, "Alun hung around with us and was careful to try and put words in our mouths that he might've heard us speak, so I thought he did a very good script."^[6] Owen spent several days with the group, who told him their lives were like "a train and a room and a car and a room and a room and a room"; the character of Paul's grandfather refers to this in the dialogue.^[7] Owen wrote the script from the viewpoint that the Beatles had become prisoners of their own fame, their schedule of performances and studio work having become punishing. The screenplay was nominated for an Oscar.

Because the Beatles weren't actors, the script is full of one-liners. This makes the film fast and snappy too. However, although John and Paul don't seem to act, George has a scene with a marketing man who is trying to sell merchandise to teens in which he seems to remain his own man, and Ringo just seems to be enjoying himself - has a great scene chatting to a boy by the Thames in Twickenham (which every reviewer mistakes for a canal).

The writer seems to have noticed that John was the one with the bolshie personality; although it is Ringo who runs away it is John who has their manager saying "You're a swine, John Lennon" at the end of the movie. You notice that John looks older than the others: he looks as though he is just outgrowing the idea of a rock band in suits and ties, he is probably fed up with not being able to wear glasses - he was very short-sighted, he is happiest singing his own music but eventually he will take a dislike to the whole idea of show business. The wonder is that he stayed with it for so long.

The writer picked up on the fact that John and Paul had Irish ancestry - so he makes Paul's grandfather Irish and in a scene at the police station, the latter recites a list of crimes and tortures the English had practised on the Irish. It's within a Keystone Kops kind of scenario where the police ask if their arrestees want a cup of tea before they all go running around ineffectually, so it's like finding a hand grenade in a bag of tennis balls. If you want to be reminded of realpolitik it's right there. And there is also a scene right in front of a bombed out church - this is the early 60s and the UK was still too poor to deal with bomb sites - and every shop and pub in this film full of snapshots, indicates poverty and hand to mouth living. Men had authoritarian voices and barked orders, indicating that they had done national service and were used to hierarchy. This is how the country really was, and this is what the Beatles, and the rest of us, were escaping from.

There's more fun with mirrors in this scene.

An impossible shot

and more fun with mirrors here