My multi-lingual, multi-media journey with Elena Ferrante's four Neapolitan Novels started back in 2022. Two years later, I'd read all four -- but had had access only to the first three seasons of the acclaimed television version.

I noticed recently that the fourth season (directed by Laura Bispuri) had become available.

Must watch, we said.

This was actually the first time we'd turned on the TV in this flat... We needed to reorient the recliners from their captain's-cabin position to their screen-watching configuration. And we broke out our last bottle of tuak to celebrate the occasion (which turned out, surprisingly, to be fizzy, meaning we had to drink the whole lot in one go, and were lucky it wasn't too alcoholic...).




Cultural fusion...

The fourth volume in the series was the one that I'd liked the least. The writing is still wonderful; the questions posed are still apposite. But there was something about it that didn't work as well, and I put this down to the sheer number of years it was trying to cover. The first three volumes tackle much shorter time spans, and are correspondingly more intense -- really intense, actually, so that the dialogue quivers in the air, and you're on the edge of your seat wondering what's going to HAPPEN...

The television versions have been pretty faithful to the books (Elena Ferrante is always involved in the screenplay), and although some of the fourth book's details are necessarily omitted or telescoped, this one also adheres fairly closely to the original. Which means, however, that it shares the novel's weakness -- too great a number of years... Even though this season gives us ten episodes instead of the habitual eight, it still felt as though the narrative had been accelerated, and in the process attenuated.

Elena and Lila, the two key protagonists, whose troubled relationship has formed the driving force for all the novels, are played by different people in this fourth series (Alba Rohrwacher and Irene Maiorino). This is understandable. It would be less than credible for the younger versions (Gaia Girace and Margherita Mazzucco) to carry their characters forward all those decades. In the case of Lila, the similarity (and somehow the continuity) was striking. The rather different look of Elena, on the other hand, I found a little disconcerting.

What stood out visually? The phones... I'm not sure any element of modern life so clearly marks the passing decades as the style of our telephones... And that view from Lenu's flat, looking over the Gulf of Naples to Mount Vesuvius, was just stunning. I was a little dubious about the costumes... The Lost Child begins at the latter end of the 1970s, but none of the clothes looked nearly ugly enough... Maybe, as Nigel said, the Italians had better taste.


Polignano a Mare, 2019. Go east from Naples...

On the whole, though, I found many episodes a little flat -- again, possibly, because of the briskness the chronology demanded. The 1980 earthquake, for example, seemed to me like the portrayal of an earthquake at the theatre... This episode in the book gives us the clearest picture we've yet had of a curious mental condition that makes Lila feel as though the margins of things are dissolving. We get a description of this in the televised version, and I understand that you don't want the series to detract from the deliberate vagueness of the book, but I would have thought that a visual medium could have been exploited more fully in depicting what was essentially a visual phenomenon.

Lila is largely missing from the first stretch of the series, making you realize how much this whole novel-sequence is dependent on the Lila-Elena dynamic. No other relationship holds a candle to the enigmas of this one.

The ending of the TV series also seemed to give Lila less agency than she had in the book. What happened to her came across here as a straightforward decline, whereas the original gives us much more nuance on that process.

My misgivings are not reflected in many of the reviews, it seems. Amari Allah concurs that it "often feels rushed in the worst way". But for Rebecca Nicholson, the series "goes out on a high"; and James Poniewozik finds it "a brilliant conclusion".

Despite my slight disappointment, the series kept me interested. And I couldn't NOT have watched it. I feel it rounds out my Lila/Lenu experience, and now it's time to visit more of Ferrante's work...