From around Chapter 40 to Chapter 75, the author constructed a self-contained story that took place on the beach of Ischia, where Lila, Lenu, Nino, and, initially, Pinuccia and Bruno Saccovo spent a massive amount of time together. This takes up approximately one third of the book and is constructed like a novella within a novel. The location is limited almost entirely to the beach, away from the neighborhood with a large cast of characters who are always minding each other's business, and only 3 to 5 young people with raging hormones are hanging out at any given time. The confined setting intensifies the relationships and conflicts among them. More important, this story has its own arc of beginning, development, climax, and resolution. But don't worry, the larger novel also has its own arc, and an even more explosive climax comes after the story in the middle.
It puzzled me for days why this segment has to take up so much space. Lila and Nino fell in love slowly. The girls spent the early days listening to Nino's endless political babbling. There were many ups and downs, hesitant touches, and half-hearted denials. The month on the beach seemed so monotonous, so interminable, as if time had stopped and the summer would never end. Only by Chapter 85 (after the end of the vacation) did I realize how massive Lila's choice to leave her husband for Nino was and why it had to take so long: In an insulated working class neighborhood in 1960s Naples, no one, absolutely no one, had even thought of divorce. A more likely scenario would have been murder (ie, divorce, the Italian style).
Even so, every reader knows, from the last chapter of the previous book, that Lila's marriage to Stefano could not last. It ended before it even started. Lila confessed to Lenu that she had felt numb and on the verge of (spiritual) death in her marriage. But she was only 17 and the most vigorously alive person in the neighborhood. If Lila were to submit to the social norms of the neighborhood, she would have to become another Gigliola or Pinuccia and kill her indomitable spirit. Well, that's not going to happen. So the marriage is doomed. Nevertheless, how to get there without making her look anachronistic or unrealistic could have been a real problem. A young woman of her time and background needed an enormous amount of drive to overcome not only her environment but her own conscience. Thus comes a catalyst to give her a reason to do what she had to do, sooner or later. The love affair with Nino became the impetus for Lila to finally leave Stefano, but the process has to be meticulously and convincingly laid out, at least for Italian readers.
It seems a little reductive to call Nino "a catalyst," but that is more or less the function of this character throughout the quartet --- not that the passions and suffering felt by all three characters were any less palpable or sincere.
For many years, the idea of people using people was taboo to me. It seems so despicable that I was afraid of even thinking about it. However, psychotherapy changed that and helped me see how people never stop using each other, often unconsciously and sometimes constructively. Relationship is not a zero-sum game. A person may not lose anything by being used, and both the user and the used may come out with more than they have had. People who love each other especially use each other all the time and both sides can derive pleasure from it.
A closer look reveals more patterns of characters using each other. When Lila first hired Lenu to accompany her on the beach vacation with a health-related purpose, Lenu agreed on the condition that they go to Ischia instead of another beach town, so that she could be close to Nino, because she knew he would be in the nearby city Forio. Here Lenu used Lila. Then Lila used Lenu's friendship with Nino to become close to Nino, which triggered everything that followed. While Lenu felt used and angry, she was spurred by her disappointment in Nino and Lila to pursue higher education at the free university in Pisa. Before this turn of events, Lenu had always been ambivalent about her future: to stay or to go away, to become just like her mother or to forever escape the same fate. After that, she no longer had any doubt. Unconsciously, Lila's escape brought about Lenu's escape. At the moment it seemed like a loss, but pain pushed both girls beyond what they had thought they were capable of.
No comments:
Post a Comment