The Many Faces of Ferrante
We’re revisiting Elena Ferrante’s novels on the radio, now that they’re also on TV. Listen today at 2 pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.
We stepped away from our corona coverage this week and re-ran a show from a couple of years ago about the wonderful quartet of Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante. [Chris Lydon had a viral false alarm early in the week, but he is well, reading The Pickwick Papers (meh he says), and we’re charging ahead into next week’s show with what can only be described as relish.]
The hook for our Ferrante reprise was the launch of the second season of the HBO series, My Brilliant Friend: The Story of a New Name (based on the second book of Ferrante’s quartet). Our show has guests Megan O’Grady, Dayna Tortorici, and Nilanjana Roy—the conversation covers a lot, from the novels’ feminism to the parallels between the novels’ central friendship and the friendship between Wordsworth and Coleridge.
The Neopolitan novels could be an escape while you’re locked down, but the HBO series is so faithful to the books (and the pseuodonymous Ferrante has worked on the screenplay as well) that you can be forgiven for going straight to the screen version. The casting and the filming are perfect, just as you imagine Lila and Lenu and their families and neighbors in 1950’s Naples.
Of the second season, director and showrunner Saverio Costanzo (who was chosen by Ferrante) says: “Behind the narrative I could see history with a capital ‘h’ was evolving and maturing. When I thought about how to bring all of this to the screen it was an inescapable fact that the 1950s are the years of neo-realism,” but then, as the story was entering the 1960s, he says he felt the need to break with tradition and took cues from France’s Nouvelle Vague and French directors of those days — Godard, Rohmer, and Truffaut. Season three is set in the 70’s, and Costanzo says cinematic references and tone will be shifting into New Hollywood territory and cites Scorsese, De Palma, Coppola, and Bogdanovich as influences.
Read: Normal People
Speaking of adaptations of novels we love, the Times previews Normal People, the 12-part Hulu series coming at the end of the month based on Sally Rooney’s best-selling novel.
Collected here are some Normal People quotes that are uncannily appropriate for a year of solitude and grief:
Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head.
If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed.
Most people go through their whole lives, without ever really feeling that close with anyone.
It suggests to Connell that the same imagination he used as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them.
What If All Literature Is Right for Lockdown?
The New York Times ran a profile on the celebrated novelist Ottessa Mosfegh with this subtitle:
The author-provocateur’s latest novel is “a loneliness story.” Just when it was scheduled to come out, isolation became the new normal.
But, then again, isolation has always been normal, that’s a lurking implication of the very title “Normal People,” and all stories are loneliness stories in some way. Or at least a lot of them are, or maybe it’s just a disproportionate number of our best stories deal most intensely with this basic existential conundrum. Don Quixote, Milton’s Satan, Jo March, Sula, Howard Ratner, Jane Eyre, Frankenstein, Lambert Strether, Sally Rooney characters, Charles Foster Kane, Robinson Crusoe, Hamlet, Hal Incandenza: all lonely, if in different ways. We’ve been preparing for lockdown for millenia.
Look at what critics say about reading, too, or what writers say about reading—from Harold Bloom to Virginia Woolf, it seems everyone recognizes that literature and creativity come from lonely places. It’s getting redundant to talk about what literature and radio can do during the pandemic, but that might be because literature and radio have always redundantly done the same thing year after year after year after year: address loneliness and allow people, briefly, to make something out of their loneliness.
Our Patreon Spree: Lockdown Library
Because radio and books have always provided comfort in bad times, we’re making sure to bring audio conversations and literary work even closer together. Over on Open Source’s Patreon, producer Adam Colman is now running a weekly series of conversations with writers and storytellers. We’re calling it “Close Reading at a Social Distance.”
In the first installment, the novelist Emily Gould talks about the literary anxieties and the complexities of parenting in bad times.
In our second installment, Daniel Levin Becker talks about literary escape routes from within confinement. He’s a member of the Oulipo, the mischievous French literary collective committed to using algorithms and other constraints for producing literature. In this show, constraints that he describes using for imaginative escape include the very rooms of a Parisian apartment under lockdown. This is literary Houdini stuff. You need to hear it.
Please think of joining our Patreon community, and hear some conversations with brilliantly creative people. It’s also the best way to help support us. And thanks to those who have donated recently—we’ve received wonderful notes. They’re hugely gratifying and help pass the time in quarantine.
This Week’s Ephemeral Library
Ben Smith grills New York Times editor Dean Baquet on the timing of their story on the sexual assault accusations against Joe Biden. Zadie Smith on death coming to America.An interview with Nadège Trebal. Ruin and austerity in London. Saidiya Hartman and more in the quarantine files. Angela Merkel on flattening the curve. The NYT’s Don McNeill on The Year Ahead . Virus hunting in Massachusetts.
That’s it for this week, folks. Stay safe!
The OS immunologists.
