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).
