Author Archives: John Catalinotto

POST 10 — Quaking with fear

Eboli after the Irpinia Earthquake of Nov. 23, 1980.

THIS WAS IN WIKIPEDIA: The quake struck at 18:34 UTC (19:34 local). The first jolt was followed by 90 aftershocks. There were three main shocks, each with epicenters in a different place, within 80 seconds. The largest shock registered a peak acceleration of 0.38g, with 10 seconds of motion greater than 0.1g. The three main shocks combined produced 70 seconds of shaking greater than 0.01g.

The Iripinia Earthquake of Nov. 23, 1980 killed between 2500 and 5000 people and injured about 9000 more. It wiped out a couple of rural towns and did a lot of damage in Naples. It wasn’t the worst earthquake in Italian history (one killed something like 75000 people in Sicily in 1908) but it was certainly big enough to symbolize the insecurity of everything and to reinforce Lila’s primal fear that everything and everyone were dissolving around the edges.

On p171 bottom (end of chapter 49), Lenù writes: Lila, always in control of everything, at that moment wasn’t in control of anything. Of course Lila wasn’t always in control, but to Lenù she gave that appearance. The earthquake opens up Lila completely: Fantasies fed on fantasies, and Lila, I saw, believed everything. (p172, chapter 50) During their time in Lila’s car, after the major earthquake shocks are over and everyone is flowing by, and Marcello drives his car on the sidewalk, Lila says: the cars boundaries were dissolving, those of Marcello too. (p173) Lila is able finally to tell Lenù how terrified she has been all her life at losing control, that the reality of life is not the order we impose on it, but an enormous mess mixing at the edges that it takes all of Lila’s intelligence and energy to keep in bounds. The earthquake has brought the seeming solidness of matter into synch with Lila perceptions when she feels she is losing her mind; now it is reality and her confession is no longer something that defines her as mentally ill. The earthquake proves that she has been right and sane all along. What is the real world, Lenù, nothing, nothing, nothing about which one can say conclusively. (p176)

It turns out Lila would also have been proven accurate in her pessimistic attitude toward corruption in Naples, which, I would add, is not at all limited to the South or to Italy — one can imagine a serious investigation into the real-estate industry in New York. MORE WIKIPEDIA, sourced from a book about the Camorra: Of the $40 billion spent on earthquake reconstruction, an estimated $20 billion went to create an entirely new social class of millionaires in the region, $6.4 billion went to the Camorra, whereas another $4 billion went to politicians in bribes. Only the remaining $9.6 billion a quarter of the total amount, was actually spent on people’s needs.[5]

Post 7 – Background of Communist movement in Italy, 1943-on

Some of the students have either researched or remembered those days of ’68-’69. I’d like to fill in a few of the developments that were left out, plus clarify some references that Lenu’ makes in the third volume.

When Italy tried to make a separate peace with the Allies in September 1943, Germany still occupied much of the Italian peninsula. They maintained Mussolini and his fascist party in power in much of the country (while U.S. and British troops moved north from Sicily). One reason the Italian Communist Party (Partito Communista Italiano — PCI) was so popular and strong in the post-war period is that the Communists were the main organizers of a partisan guerrilla war against the German occupation and the fascists. They were especially strong in the northern part of the country and organized an uprising on April 25, 1945, that liberated those parts from the German occupation before the U.S. troops arrived. There was even an uprising in Naples, which I’ll discuss later.

Not only did the Communist vote grow from about 20% to 35% nationally by the mid-1970s, but the party governed cities; for example, Bologna had almost uninterrupted governance by the party. And the Communist Party was very strong in the working class in the industrial centers of Genoa, Turin and Milan; they led the main unions. Right after the war, because the fascists were completely discredited for destroying Italy, while the smaller capitalist parties were compromised with fascism, it appeared possible that the Communists would take power. The U.S. State Department got these small capitalist parties to unite and along with the Vatican created the Christian Democrats, and the U.S. did everything it could to decide the 1948 election. The Christian Democrats led the national government from about 1948 to 1960 or so and then in alliance with the Socialist Party and others until the 1990s. But I don’t want to get ahead on this.

By the time of the 68-69 massive workers’ strikes and student protests, the more radical students and workers considered the Communist Party of Italy (PCI) to be quite conservative and tied to the existing political structure. (The U.S. and the Italian capitalists and military on the other hand never wanted to allow the PCI into the national government and had secret organizations determined to stop this from happening.) In the novel we see Pasquale, a worker who starts as a PCI member, grow furious at the party leadership, calling them bureaucrats. He is also angry that they didn’t support his father when he was charged with murdering Don Achille, and says his father “had taken part in the Four Days of Naples,” (p116) which was the uprising against the fascists and the German occupation in Naples (an aside, there is a movie of that name about the uprising, which I saw at least twice in the 1960s). Lenu’ also grows disillusioned with the PCI, and at one time she says that she stopped reading l’Unita‘, the PCI newspaper, and started reading Lotta Continua and Il Manifesto. (p249)

The movement was so big that these other newspapers were produced by other political organizations, Lotta Continua and some Lenu’ doesn’t mention like Democrazia Proletaria, Avanguardia Operai that were considered more revolutionary that the PCI. They themselves had thousands of members and tens of thousands of sympathizers although they were small compared to the PCI itself.

Lenu’ also mentions some of the bombings, in particular that of a bank in Milan, which I had forgotten. I remember a bombing of the Bologna train station that killed a lot of people and also one of a train traveling near Brescia in the north of the country. While there was an attempt to blame those bombings on small communist groups that were made up of people even more frustrated than Pasquale, but were unable to, it was too unreasonable. It turned out that there was a right-wing militarist conspiracy that carried out such actions precisely to prevent the PCI from entering the government.

Lila, by the way, is a fantastic organizer on the shop floor, at least how Lenu described it. Well, I’ve written enough so I’ll stop here.

Post 4 – A wrinkle in time

There are many ways to bend time to tell your story.

Ferrante breaks the chronology of the story for a second time at the beginning of volume 2. The author makes two jumps at once, one back to 2010 (or maybe now it’s 2011 since it has taken some time to write the first volume) and one that jumps from the wedding in 1960, when Lila and Lenù are 16 years old, to 1966, when Lenù, who reveals her inner thoughts (to the extent she can) to the reader, feels that she and Lila are estranged and their relationship at its worst point. To her surprise, Lila shows up and hands her a well-tied-up collection of personal notebooks, which she must hold for Lila but has to pledge not to read. Of course Lenù begins reading them immediately (could Lila have possibly thought otherwise) and cannot resist continuing, even after they upset her. At some point, after reading, rereading and even memorizing some of what Lila wrote, Lenù dumps the books into the river over a bridge. Thus Ferrante has set up the scenario so that Lenù, writing about Lila, has gained access to Lila’s own descriptions of her though processes and even her revelations of those processes. Or, to be precise, she has her memory of what she read of Lila’s notebooks as her now (2010) more reliable insight into Lila’s own thoughts and feelings, as filtered through her own selective memory. She makes some revisions of Lenù’s own earlier reaction to, for example, Lila’s letter to her when she is on Ischia, which she then evaluated as an act of spontaneous genius. After reading the notebooks she realizes that Lila worked out much of her thinking and all of her formulations before she wrote the letter, that her friend might still be a self-taught genius, but even geniuses have to put in hard work, the result comes not through magic. The notebooks also reveal the utter misery of Lila’s life despite her relative luxury and her ability to make her husband give her money or support her whims, so when Lenù resumes the story she can believably tell it and let all us readers know how Lila feels although Lila is hiding much of those feelings from the others present. The treason of her husband, revealed on the wedding night by his subservience to his own ambitions (and thus to maintaining good relations with the Solaras at Lila’s cost), followed by his rape of a furious, unhappy and unwilling Lila (there is no sign up to now, indeed, up through volume 3, that Lila has any pleasure from sex, only pain and humiliation), has poisoned the marriage. Ferrante is able to do this through her jump through time and by referencing the notebooks.

The conceit of a discovered diary or set of notebooks is a useful one for an author. I put one (it fits the character) in my own novel, though I’m not sure if I’ll keep it. How, when you have one main narrator, to open up another. I got a text from my sister last week wishing that our mother had kept a diary recording her thoughts at various key moments of her life (Mom, like Lenù, was an ace student but forced to go to work at 15 — all three of her children spent at least some time in graduate school, which she helped get us to).