- As a lover of Elena Ferrante's superb Neapolitan Quartet, My Brilliant Friend, I couldn't wait to get into this. And it didn't disappoint. It's vintage Ferrante - family, school, friendships, sexual stresses and strains, a micro drama of a young Italian teenager's transition to adulthood. Ferrante captures the intensity of this process perfectly, and deals with the conflicting emotions with precision. She sucks you in.
- Naples is effectively two cities: the upper classes live in the hills, the lower classes down in the grubby parts. The teenage Giovanna, from an affluent family, is coming of age and is over-sensitive and hyper dramatic. Her educated father Andrea detests his illiterate sister Vittoria who inhabits the lower realm. Giovanna is navigating that relationship and wising up.
- Andrea is a rather prissy, opinionated intellectual; Vittoria an earthy, vigorous, loud and vulgar character. She's also presented as quite melodramatic and a little comical. Giovanna has to come to terms with '...an incongruous juxtaposition of vulgarity and refinement’. And the smart young woman, who reads books and listens to music, is having to deal with the rough boys of the hood, the 'debased humanity' of lower Naples.
- Milan features again. As in the quartet, it is presented as an important city for aspiration and culture. Escaping Naples becomes a necessity. Very few authors dissect with such precision the emotional complexity of these constant tensions.
- Unfortunately the novel suffers from very poor copy editing, and it's annoying. Constant run-on sentences, separated by commas instead of full stops, can't be attributed to Ferrante or to the English translator Ann Goldstein. The buck stops with the editor.
- And although universally lauded for her translation of the quartet, Goldstein falls short in this novel. There's a frequent awkwardness to it. Here are a few examples: 'outside the family accords, secretly’ (‘i accordi’ means 'arrangements', a better word); ‘...the dailiness of my body’ ('quotidian ordinariness' would have been better); ‘...it was my first experience of privation’ (I don't know what that means); ‘street atlas’ (rather than 'maps' or 'directory').
- Nevertheless, a hugely enjoyable read.
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