The Elena Ferrante quartet is making bigger and bigger impression on me. It is a compulsive reading. I read it at any free moment of my days and at times I even neglect things I should be doing instead of reading. I realized that my feelings about the book are ambivalent when my dentist seeing me appearing in his surgery with the book asked me what I am reading and how I like it.
My dentist is a great dentist and a very nice person. I heard many times that the dentists have the highest suicide rate. I do not know answers to questions: “in relations to whom?” or “what are the reasons for it?” I just assumed that it must be a boring, repetitive job, patients typically are afraid of them and it is difficult to build a rapport with people who can not speak during the visit. My dentist found the way around it. His routine, I have not seen changed for the last fifteen years, is to have a social ten minutes before he starts his professional job. He has wide interests and the good memory. I even look forward to the interaction at the beginning of the visit that is not particularly attractive even if my approach to dentists is perhaps atypically positive. The other day he asked the question which made me aware of my ambivalent feeling towards the book I am reading. My answer was “This is a quartet about life in Naples starting in the fifties and continuing for more than fifty years. Mainly about friendship. It reads very well, but I am not sure if it is a good book or just a trashy one.”
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| Naples is now on my bucket list |
I am almost finished with the second book, The Story of a New Name, and I am just starting to think that it is a good book after all. Obviously not all really good books have to be heavy to read. It is a danger however that reading the book fast and with only short breaks I may miss points that are important. It is my job to stop from time to time and reflect a bit before new messages bombard me in following chapters. So, I have stopped reading this morning to reflect a bit on what I have read so far.
For me this is the book about a complicated friendship, needs for inspiration, about Naples and its Camorra, about growing out of one's neighbourhood, about bettering oneself, about the role of women in men’s life and many other universal life dilemmas.
Since my knowledge about Camorra was almost not existent before I started to read the book, I had to look up the WikipediA and it said:
The Camorra is an Italian Mafia-type crime syndicate, or secret society, which arose in the region of Campania and its capital Naples. It is one of the oldest and largest criminal organizations in Italy, dating back to the 16th century. Unlike the pyramidal structure of the Sicilian Mafia, the Camorra's organizational structure is more horizontal than vertical. Consequently, individual Camorra clans act independently of each other, and are more prone to feuding among themselves.
I already found all of that confirmed in the book in a literary way. Even if mafia’s life is not the most important fascination for me, I was surprised to realize how natural it is for young men in Naples to get on the payroll of the organization and treat their involvement as a regular job. Sure the job requires sometimes sorting out problems of one’s bosses and do it with force and violence, but it does not have to be in conflict with commendable values that some members of Camorra may have.
| Recruting and teaching |
Related to the role of Camorra of controlling business and money, there is one other aspect that made me think almost with some sort of envy, this is caring for people the organization or their members consider as belonging to their circle. They do not have to formally belong to the organization, but if they are in trouble, and this is almost always noticed, help comes from many sources. This resonates with me strongly as I have recognized some time ago that belonging is an important aspect of our lives. In comorric society one always belongs somewhere, want is or not. Some time ago I would consider that invasive. Private life should be just that – private. But reading the book I almost long for somebody watching over me with an intention to help when needed. Some stories I am reading about are very appealing to me from this point of view. It seems that primitive societies offer their members more humanity than we receive in our sophisticated, well organized, highly developed ones.
Hmm, something to think about…
I got to my “800 words” (not coincidently, this is the name of a new Australian serial), so I stop here for today. My closing remark: if reading the book brought me to the subject of loneliness in modern societies, it must be a book of value after all.
