People chose passages about the impersonal violence of Naples, the violence in the girls’ families, and a resulting early loss of innocence; there is the violence that the girls witness or hear about (for example, the murder of Don Achille) and the bodily violence they experience directly. Finally, Lenù and Lila experience intense, violent emotions. Blood makes its appearance in the story Lila fabricates about Don Achille’s death, as well as when Lila threatens Marcello. The girls cannot escape any of this violence, and thus Lila comes up against a fate she cannot escape because, in this place, the father’s word goes. Lila’s brilliance is a bad fit with their environment and social and economic conditions.
There is also the theme of time: that of a child’s – being always in the moment – versus an adult’s. Yet the girls’ early acts, such as going up the stairs to Don Achille’s, create consequences that work on their lives for decades.
Competition is part of the friendship from the beginning. As they hit puberty, Lenù tries to ease her anxiety about Lila’s brilliance by finding ways she is better than Lila, however petty those ways are. Even the book is purportedly written so that Lenù will win “this time” (23). Lenù gets to tell this story; Lila never gets to tell her own story or the story of the friendship. Whoever controls the narrative controls the outcome of the story and how it is told.
In this historical period there are many narratives by authors who are women, oppressed/colonized, young, queer, survivors of genocide, etc., which are readily accepted and can even gain critical acclaim and an enthusiastic readership. The multiplication of narratives is a postmodernist construct and perspective. Yet – at the same time, to quote Stefania! – Lenù, the one who got out, who made a life that is different than what the poverty and narrowness of that slice of society dictated – in other words, the ultimate victor – gets to tell the story, not Lina. In the end Lenù writes the story, while Lina disappears herself. Yet, paradoxically, she cannot disappear from Lenù’s memory (Guzman), and Lenù writes not one but four volumes about them, their friendship, and Naples.
