Tag Archives: time

Back to the Future

In the very first chapter of The Story of a New Name, Elena skips ahead a few years before returning to the chronological order. In the leap forward in time, Elena is describing a time when she is distanced from the neighbourhood and her relationship with Lila she sees as being “terrible”, but polite (page 15, The Story of a New Name). Lila has given Lenù journals that she has written about her life the past few years, and the neighbourhood. Another major time the chronology has been disrupted is in the first novel when Elena writes of Lila telling her about the dissolving borders the first time it happened on new years eve 1958, which she does not tell Lenù about until 1980.

Both times, Elena is recounting finding out some inner secrets and confidence of Lila’s. Except for these breaks in chronology, the novels are told exclusively from from Lenù perspective at the time, never revealing future events, so these breaks are very significant. Yet they are never fast forwards to Lenù’s life, they are always about Lila. They reveal very little about the situation or life Lenù is living in that time, sticking with the method throughout the books of only describing her feelings at that certain time, and never disclosing what she knows will happen in the future until it actually does happen.

Time for the meta-post!

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.