#389: The Book Collection
From single to series
Matching pastel spines begin to dominate one cube of my bookshelf — the moment when a book stops being a single entity and moves towards a collection. A growing thing that exists beyond the sum of its parts.
Here are three out of four of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. And another of her later works.
I used to have a Jacqueline Wilson box set and a row of mismatched paperbacks from a popular wizarding series. Books in a series extend the unit of reading from pages into books, demonstrating the amount of time dedicated to one specific world. One author’s sprawling creation, tangibly displayed in its domination of the bookcase.
After years of reading individual books by a myriad of authors, my shelves are being taken over. Elena Ferrante pushes through the other paperbacks.
And the question I have is: why? Why, after not touching a series, or barely a second book by the same author, since childhood, has Elena Ferrante consumed me?
As I write, I eat fake Italian gelato and I consider reason number one: Italy. Or rather, Naples. Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet is steeped in a specific neighbourhood that, even when exited, creeps back into its characters’ lives. Naples is itself a character, or perhaps it is the novel’s godlike agent, the narrative’s author, predisposing which way these characters’ lives will go faster than Ferrante can write. And Ferrante takes time to truly write Naples. I have never visited its streets, but now I know its funicular, its pizzerias, its gardens… Returning, regularly, to one place, be that Middle Earth or busy Naples, is in the very DNA of the book series. It is familiar and it is all-encompassing.
Glancing at the other books on my bookcase, I hypothesise reason number two: that this series exists at all. Book series are generally reserved for specific genres — fantasy often — or for children’s literature. They are not usually the terrain of contemporary literary novels. The fact I can read a book that I love, and then later read more of it, is just that: novel.
It is, however, clear to me that the answer, in reality, is this: friendship. Not giggling, instagrammable friendship, but friendship that builds and tears in every phone call. Friendship that is co-dependent, and that is explored from the very infancy of that co-dependency. I have never read such an elongated examination of one female friendship. Other characters come and go, but the friendship between the Quartet’s main characters, even in the moments of its absence, is always felt.
Books, after all — these unmoving objects — are predominantly about living, breathing people. And if you can get them to live and breathe across four long novels, across thousands of pages, then they are people that will stay with their readers for life.
