Life afer finishing Neapolitan quartet

It took a while to read the Neapolitan quartet, big parts of my days and evenings were filled in with reading the books. Now I have finished. There are and will be gaps in my days I will automatically like to fill in with continuing the story. Today I will write about my impressions even if I am conscious of the fact that this is not the subject that interests many of people who may stumble over my blog. Maybe I do not give the book justice it deserves or maybe the book itself is not of wider interest. In any case, my stats show that my posts related to the Neapolitan story dropped. I do not mean to say that I do not care, but I write the blog mainly for myself. The reading of the quartet was a rather personal exercise. The story stirred me, clarified some of my thoughts and gave new meaning to my memories.

It is a dark book. Conclusions one can draw are pessimistic and depressing. Idealistic and somewhat naïve people, like me, have to eventually accept facts of life and they are not pretty. This applies to human nature and to politics and politicians. None of the characters of the books is a knight in a shining armor; they are all very human not to say imperfect or even evil. While reading the books I identified with some of the characters, their thinking, and actions. From the beginning, I took the events on a face value, but the analysis that followed in later parts added disturbing depth and hypothesis.

Writing about mistakes of young people that were made out of need and desire for love and recognition, Elena Ferrante stresses the point that mistakes are unavoidable.  They have to be respected by older and wiser by letting such situations to run its course without interfering. This is not what parents typically think and do believing that their children need to be helped and advised, sometimes even forbidden to proceed with their plans. Elena Ferrante says to parents -  let the mistakes happen and even give their support.  Do not interfere with your children and your own fate. This is not resignation followed by critical observation after forthcoming disasters and thinking “I told you so”. This is accepting that things need to go along the way the objects see as right for them. Almost like accepting fate in the style of Greek tragedies. I have made some mistakes in my life, some wrong decisions; I even acted the way I feel ashamed of. Like anybody else. Reading the book, I forgave myself for that. I could not have acted differently at the time with knowledge, experience, and feelings I had. It had to be like it was. The sad events, the ones that helped me to build my charter as it is now, took a different meaning while reading the book, they do not seem disturbing. At least I do not feel hard done by the events and the people who hurt me. This is the power of the book. It takes one through the stories that one can relate to and see them from new perspectives.

This is another book about writing and writers. Knausgard and Ferrante write about themselves and their lives as writers. They make it very clear that writers need to expose themselves in their most intimate, difficult moments of life and write about their inner life. Even if what they write is supposed to be fiction. Some of us bloggers call ourselves writers. I do not. I do not have sufficient courage or confidence. However, writing was my dream since I was a young girl. I think that all of us readers, at some stage dream of writing ourselves. Those dreams wake up at the time when professional careers finish. People start to blog. Does it make us potential writers? In my opinion not many of us, but we can have fun and explore. I do.