The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Elena Ferrante · L’amica geniale · the first of the four Neapolitan Novels, scored as the first volume alone: a list of characters, a Prologue and two parts · Edizioni e/o, Rome, 2011 · scored on Ferrante’s Italian, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Ann Goldstein’s English (2012) used for sense, and only titles and terms quoted
Mode
Novel of a friendship and of a quarter: a retrospective first-person chronicle, a fairy tale in its first part and a social novel in its second
Mythos
The ogre, the dark cellar, the lost dolls and the gift of gold; the doubles, one who stays and one who goes; the self’s work passing to the enemy
Phase
From early childhood in a poor rione on the edge of Naples in the 1950s to Lila’s wedding at sixteen, around 1960 to 1961, told in 2010 after Lila vanishes at sixty-six
Presentation
Fiction; a list of characters grouped by family, a Prologue and two parts, narrated in the first person by Elena Greco in her sixties
Register
A flat, rapid, almost popular prose, with dialect reported rather than transcribed, rising in a few places to terror and to the dissolving of outlines
Scale
One quarter, one decade, two girls and the families of a street; the first of four volumes
Governing Proposition
In a poor quarter on the edge of Naples in the 1950s two girls grow up measured against each other: Elena Greco, who studies and will leave, and Raffaella Cerullo, called Lila, who teaches herself, is kept from school, and marries at sixteen. Elena tells it in her sixties, after Lila has vanished and removed every trace of herself. The wager of the novel is that a friendship between women can be the central relation of a life, made of rivalry, dependence and theft as much as of love; that the one who leaves through education owes her very standard to the one who stays; and that the violence of a poor quarter is not the exception to its life but its grammar.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book begins in 2010, with a telephone call. Rino calls to say that Lila is gone. She is sixty-six, and she has taken every trace of herself with her, down to her image, cut out of the photographs. The Prologue is titled “Cancellare le tracce” (Eliminating all traces), and the act it names is the occasion of everything that follows.
Elena Greco, called Lenù, Lila’s friend since childhood and in her sixties herself, answers by doing what Lila has refused: she decides to write it all down, to see who wins. The whole book is therefore an act of possession. Elena writes Lila so that she cannot vanish, and in writing her she puts herself at the centre. The envy, the self-justification and the doubt that run through every judgment of Lila come from this choice of form, and they are the book’s deepest disclosure.
Before the story stands a list of characters grouped by family, as in a nineteenth century novel or a parish register: the Grecos, the Cerullos, the Carraccis, the Solaras and the rest. It says at once that the subject is the quarter, not two girls only. Then the story goes back to a poor rione on the edge of Naples in the 1950s, and to two small girls.
Movement II
The first part is titled “Infanzia. Storia di don Achille” (Childhood: The Story of Don Achille), and it is a fairy tale built from the inside. The girls’ dolls are lost through a grate into a dark cellar. Don Achille, whom they have imagined as a beast of the underworld before they have seen a man, is the ogre of the street, and the two girls climb the stairs to his door, holding hands, to demand the dolls back. A child’s terror is held at its full size.
The ogre gives them money. With it they buy a copy of Little Women, a book of sisters, and from it comes the dream of writing a book and getting rich. The chain is plain and strong: lost dolls, a gift of gold, a book, an ambition, and the ambition runs through the volume to its end. Behind Don Achille’s money stand the black market and moneylending, and his murder opens the fairy tale onto the history of the quarter.
School divides the girls. Lila’s father, Fernando, will not let her go on to middle school, and when she insists he throws her out of the window. She goes on alone, teaching herself from library books; Elena goes on in school, and studies Latin and Greek in part because Lila taught herself first. The violence of the quarter is not an exception to its life but its grammar, and the education that will take one girl out of it begins as a debt to the other.
Movement III
One day the girls skip school to go and see the sea, and they turn back under rain. Much later Elena comes to suspect that Lila turned back on purpose. The episode carries the friendship in one failed journey: the shared venture, the retreat, and the suspicion that the one who stays has been steering the one who will leave.
The second part, “Adolescenza. Storia delle scarpe” (Adolescence: The Story of the Shoes), follows the girls as they grow, and the book widens to the street. Melina breaks down; the Peluso and Cappuccio households, the courtships of Pinuccia, Carmela and Ada, and the teachers and prizes of Elena’s schooling all take their turns. This is the chronicle of a whole quarter, which the cast list at the front has promised.
It is also where the book spends most freely. Much of the incident is there because the chronicle wants the whole street, and because the later volumes will need these people; the middle often summarises where it should enact, and the narration names an emotion after it has shown it. The prose is flat and rapid by design, and dialect, the language of the quarter, is reported rather than transcribed, so that it is felt and never heard. Each chapter ends on a turn, and the pages keep moving.
Movement IV
On New Year’s Eve of 1958, during the fireworks war with the Solaras, Lila first feels the outlines of things and persons dissolve. The book, which keeps its register low and rises seldom, rises here: for a moment the quarter’s violence is seen from inside a mind whose edges have given way.
The Solaras are the power of the street. Their car is an instrument of power over the girls, and their money carries the Camorra and the fascist past into the present. Lila once holds a knife at Marcello Solara’s throat. It is the plainest sign in the book that she will not be bent, and the plainest measure of what the quarter does to a girl who will not.
Elena watches and measures. Everything in the book is weighed on her scale of Lila, and the scale never rests. The same law governs the fairy tale of the first part and the commerce of the second: power, money and the girls’ measurement of each other. The tone holds that law from the cellar stair to the wedding, and the range it holds is one quarter, one decade and one voice.
Movement V
Lila designs shoes. They are the self’s work, in the one form the quarter allows her. At sixteen she marries Stefano Carracci, and the book that began with an ogre at the head of a stair arrives at a wedding feast.
The Solaras come to the wedding, and Marcello is wearing the shoes Lila made: her husband has sold them to the Solaras. The volume ends there. The myth of the first part has passed into commerce, and the work of the self has passed to the enemy. The two part headings, the story of Don Achille and the story of the shoes, have carried the book from the ogre to the market.
The first volume stops where the next begins, and it is read here as itself. The later three, Storia del nuovo cognome (2012), Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta (2013) and Storia della bambina perduta (2014), complete the question of who writes whom; none of that is credited to this book, and it is charged only for what its ending costs it as a book. Its own ending is a pair of shoes on the enemy’s feet, and a narrator who, half a century later, is still writing to see who wins.
Act III · The Twelve
The book has a motor, and it is real: two girls measured against each other, each episode a new reading of the scale. A chain of cause runs from the dolls lost in the cellar to the climb to Don Achille’s door, the money he gives the girls, the copy of Little Women bought with it and the dream of writing a book and getting rich, and on to the shoes and the wedding. The subtractive test finds much that could go. The volume proceeds by accretion of neighbourhood incident: the Peluso and Cappuccio households, Melina’s breakdown, the courtships of Pinuccia, Carmela and Ada, the long sequence of teachers and prizes. Much of it is there because a chronicle of the whole street is wanted and because the later volumes will need these people; perhaps a fifth of the incident is permitted rather than compelled.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A friendship between women can be the central relation of a life, more than any marriage, and it is made of rivalry, dependence and theft as much as of love. The one who leaves through education is made by the one who stays, and owes her not affection only but her very standard: Elena studies Latin and Greek in part because Lila taught herself first, from library books, after her father barred her from the middle school. The violence of a poor quarter is not an exception to its life but its grammar. Deepest of all, the narrator’s envy is disclosed by her own account. The axis meets the bar and goes no higher, because the deepest turn of the finding, who writes whom, is completed only in the later volumes.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The register is kept low by design, and the book rises seldom. It rises in three places. The descent to the cellar and the climb to the ogre’s door hold a child’s terror at its full size. On New Year’s Eve of 1958, during the fireworks war with the Solaras, Lila first feels the outlines of things and persons dissolve, and the book opens for a moment on a fear without a floor. And the day the girls skip school to see the sea and turn back under rain carries the friendship in one failed journey. Elsewhere elevation is refused in favour of propulsion. The refusal is principled, but the axis scores height reached, not height declined, and it is the lowest of the twelve.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Myth is built here, not only evoked. The first part is a fairy tale made from the inside: the ogre, imagined by the girls as a beast of the underworld before they see a man; the dark cellar; the lost dolls; the gift of gold; the book of sisters bought with it. The doubles, one who stays and one who goes, are an ancient pattern made load-bearing in the narration itself. The shoes Lila designs, sold by her husband to the Solaras and worn by Marcello at her wedding, close the volume as a myth of the self’s work passing to the enemy. The axis stops below the bar because the second part leans on the courtship plot and the social novel, and the archetype thins as the girls grow: the pattern is fully built only across four volumes.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is in plain sight: Morante’s long novels, the serial of the nineteenth century, the realist chronicle of a quarter, the novel of education. The departure is from the literary Italian novel and from the Bildungsroman as usually written: a flat, rapid, almost popular prose; a whole social world told through a friendship between two women rather than through a family or a man’s rise; and an author withdrawn behind a pseudonym, so that nothing but the text vouches for it. The wager carried cost, since the plain register risked being taken for the feuilleton it borrows from, and in Italy it partly was. But the turn is from a proven path more than off it: the swerve is in the recombination and the voice, not in the grammar of the form.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The form knows what the book knows. A retrospective first person by the friend who left, begun because the other has cut herself out of the photographs and removed every trace of herself, makes the whole book an act of possession: Elena writing Lila so that she cannot vanish, and placing herself at the centre while she does it. Put it in the third person and the envy, the self-justification and the doubt about every judgment of Lila are gone. The cast list by family at the front, like a nineteenth century novel’s or a parish register, says the subject is the quarter and not two girls only. The two part headings move the story from myth to commerce. Held below the high eights by a middle that often summarises where it should enact.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Fifteen years of reading have found more than a first reading offers. How far is Lila Elena’s construction? Who writes whose story, when the book is one friend’s account of another who has removed herself from every record? What does education cost, and to whom is the debt owed? What are the politics of the quarter, its Camorra money and its communists? The criticism is wide and international, and these questions stay open in the volume. Held in the high sevens because the evidence is young, and because much of the commentary addresses the four volumes together, or the author’s anonymity, rather than this book alone: the yield is forecast, and only partly demonstrated.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The field is the European novel of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is moderate to strong: the book reorganises a possibility the Italian novel had left mostly to Morante and to genre, the long, plain, compulsive chronicle of women’s lives in a southern city, with a friendship between women at the centre of history rather than at its edge. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in presence it is very large, read in many languages and adapted for television, and later novels of women’s friendship are constantly set beside it. What holds the axis at 8.0 is that the reach belongs to the four volumes, not to this one alone, and that fifteen years cannot yet show which particular later works it redirected.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Fifteen years since publication in 2011. The text is whole and stable, as Edizioni e/o published it. Presence is very wide: continuous reading, teaching and translation, and adaptation, which earns a tenth above the usual figure for a modern book of its age. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: it is a period novel of the 1950s written in 2011, and such a book dates slowly, since its era is already past when it is written. No more can be claimed. Fifteen years show presence; they cannot show the survival that decades and centuries demonstrate, and the axis stands a tenth above the foot of the eights.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Judged on Ferrante’s Italian, with Ann Goldstein’s English for sense. The making is purposeful: a prose built for speed and exposure, with clauses that go straight to the act; a device of reported dialect, kept up across the whole volume, that keeps the language of the quarter felt but unheard; and a control of revelation, each chapter ending on a turn, that keeps several hundred pages taut. Against the anchors in the high eights the sentence is thin: much telling in place of scene, generalising sentences about what “we” felt, and an explanatory habit that names the emotion after showing it. How the Italian register sits against standard literary Italian is not judged here, and nothing is charged for it.
Score: 7.9 / 10
One law governs: everything is weighed on Elena’s scale of Lila, and the violence of the quarter governs every relation, from the dolls to the wedding. Take the two most distant elements: the fairy tale of the ogre in the first part, and the commerce of shoes, groceries and the Solaras’ car in the second. They obey the same law of power, money and the girls’ measurement of each other, and the one turns into the other without a break. The tone never breaks either: the plain, rapid voice holds from the cellar stair to the wedding. The range is moderate, one quarter, one decade and one voice, and that holds the figure short of the high eights.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Many orders are held, and integrated rather than listed. Consciousness, in Elena’s envy and self-doubt. The family, in the Grecos, the Cerullos and the rest, set out in the cast list. Labour, in the cobbler’s shop, the grocery and the pastry shop, and in the black market and moneylending behind Don Achille’s money. Schooling, sex and marriage. The postwar history of the quarter: fascism and the Camorra in the money of the Carraccis and the Solaras, the communism of Peluso and Pasquale. Held in the high sevens because the state and the sacred are faint, and the city beyond the quarter is seen only in glimpses: the road toward the sea, Ischia, the centre of Naples. This is one volume of four.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment at 8.5, then The Inner Law at 8.4 and The Living Form at 8.2. A disclosure that holds, of friendship between women as a rivalry that makes the self and of education as a debt to the one left behind; one law, Elena’s measure of Lila and the violence of the quarter, governing the fairy tale and the commerce alike; and a form, the retrospective first person of the friend who left, that makes the whole book an act of possession.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 7.6: a register kept low by design, rising at the cellar stair, on New Year’s Eve and on the day toward the sea, and elsewhere refusing elevation for propulsion. Next above it, The Inevitable, The Bottomless Well and The Encompassed at 7.8: a chronicle that could lose a fifth of its incident, a yield forecast more than shown in fifteen years, and a world held to one quarter and one decade; then The Made at 7.9, a purposeful plain prose that often tells where it should enact.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Inner Law at 8.4, The Living Form at 8.2, The Made at 7.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Unconcealment at 8.5 meets the bar exactly, but The Imperishable at 8.1 falls short, and The Archetypal Deep, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition, each at 8.0, fall short by half a point: an archetype built in the first part and thinning in the second, a turn made by recombination on a proven path, and a reach that belongs to four volumes more than to this one. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below The Sublime at 7.6, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The aggregate stands at 8.0, at the foot of the Canonical tier and far below the 9.0 the summit requires, and the novel is placed in Tier IV on its standing.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Elena Ferrante’s L’amica geniale, published under that pseudonym by Edizioni e/o, Rome, in 2011: the first of the four Neapolitan Novels, followed by Storia del nuovo cognome (2012), Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta (2013) and Storia della bambina perduta (2014). The unit is the first volume alone, as published in 2011: a list of characters grouped by family, the Prologue, “Cancellare le tracce”, and two parts, “Infanzia. Storia di don Achille” and “Adolescenza. Storia delle scarpe”. The later volumes are named as context only and are neither credited nor charged to it. Every axis is judged on Ferrante’s Italian; where the Italian sentence could not be judged, in its register against standard literary Italian and in the weight of the dialect withheld from it, nothing is charged. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. The story, the persons, the structure and the frame are known closely; the sentences are known moderately, and through the English. Only titles and terms are quoted, in Italian with the desk’s own English beside them; events are paraphrased and cited by part. Translation · Ann Goldstein’s English (Europa Editions, 2012) was used for sense; it is not quoted, and nothing in it is charged or credited to the novel. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the page, chapter and word counts, where in the four volumes Lila’s childhood story and the name later given to her dissolving of outlines first appear, the book’s rank among Italian novels read abroad, the number of its translations, and the particulars of its adaptations.