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I didn't compose responses to the first three Neapolitan novels and postponed doing so until I read this fourth book. (Note: I know Ferrante envisions these as a single novel, but I will call them Books 1-4.) I finished this a few weeks ago and I'm still struggling with what to say and still deciding what I think about it all. So just some observations about my reading experience:

I liked My Brilliant Friend well enough, but didn't love it the way others did and I wasn't particularly impressed by the writing or the story. I actually got a little bored with it. What was wrong with me? Because the critical reception was so positive, I assumed I wasn't approaching it from the right stance.

So, I decided to switch to the audio versions for Books 2-4. This was a mistake in the end. For the next two books I did indeed become more caught up in the story. In Book 2 I enjoyed the university setting and the romances and the beach house intrigue, and by the middle of Book 3 I felt involved in a grand multigenerational story. But neither of those reading experiences altered my impression that I was observing a melodrama, a soap opera. I wasn't interested in the neighborhood gossip and I cared very little about the rivalries and long-held grievances. There were a lot of histrionics and backstabbing and many, many tiresome arguments. I couldn't find a way to enter it intellectually, but the overblown emotionality clobbered me hard enough to keep me inside the narrative. I still couldn't ascertain whether I was impressed by the writing.

I keep using "feeling" words and not expressing what I thought - and I believe that's because I found little room for reflection within the audio. I began to despair early in Book 4 that I was missing important nuances, that the undercurrents were invisible to me, because Hilary Huber's dominant interpretation was obscuring these aspects. In Huber's tone and voice the narrator is never subtle, never changes pace, and almost always sounds angry, or envious, petulant, irritated, selfish, vengeful, or all these combined. Early in The Story of the Lost Child she (Huber) began to grate on me in a terrible way; or Elena Greco did - I really don't know. Huber was so dominant that I don't believe I could listen for the things I needed to attend to.

Also probably influenced by the audio was this impression that the pacing never seemed to vary: every dramatic moment seemed to have the same level of intensity. But I know this cannot be true. When I read prose myself I can modulate the tone and the pacing, and give emphasis where I deem it is intended. And because it was all so straightforwardly told from Elena's/Huber's point of view the narrative always sounded like a linear diaristic chronicling of the author's experiences. And since I cannot know the author's life, I couldn't convince myself it wasn't all about her. (It's not that fiction shouldn't be inspired by personal experiences - of course it is, but I seemed to be hearing an invariable "this happened, then this happened, then I went there, then I did this or that ..." )

Last night, though, I read this by Dayna Tortorici in n+1 and am a bit chagrined:

Ferrante has caused a minor crisis in literary criticism. Her novels demand treatment commensurate to the work, but her anonymity has made it hard. The challenge reveals our habits. We’ve grown accustomed to finding the true meaning of books in the histories of their authors, in where they were born and how they grew up, in their credentials or refreshing lack thereof. Forget the intentional fallacy; ours is the age of the biographical fallacy. All six of Ferrante’s novels published in English to date are narrated in the first person, which invites this kind of reading. Surely work of such intimacy and length must be — as if all novels weren’t — true.

So now I suspect that this toying with the semblance of authorship, and then refusing to reveal herself as author, may be one of Ferrante's intentions. (Recalling too the story that Lina composes and that Elena later uses, borrows, absorbs, incorporates.)

So in the end I still don't know what I think, which is to say I don't know what makes the work great. And that either means that I will never love the Neapolitan novels, or I don't understand why nearly everyone else loves them. Or it just means I didn't read them well enough this time. So maybe I will re-read the Neapolitan novels in a few years. But no promises. I could try to focus on the twinning of Elena and Lina, and the symbolism, and the sentences, and the specific details of Neapolitan life and Italian politics, and the overarching themes of feminism and female friendship - by which I mean everything other than the melodrama. If that is even possible.