In the latest issue of "Readers", Gu Ailing, the champion of the freestyle ski women's big jump at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, chose the novel "My Genius Girlfriend" created by the mysterious Italian writer Elena Ferrante. From Elena's growing environment, Lila's talent, and the growth path of a new generation of women shown in this book, you may be able to feel the figure of Gu Ailing outside the ski resort.
"My Genius Girlfriend"
1.
Gu Ailing, who was taken to the snow field by his mother at the age of 3, learned to grab the board, shoot the pole, cat jump and other actions after 1 year, won the national junior ski championship at the age of 9, participated in the adult group competition at the age of 13, and won 50 championships including 9 national championships at the age of 14... This is somewhat similar to the image of Lila in "My Genius Girlfriend":
When he was 3 years old, he learned to read and recognize when he studied with his brother, and he excelled in the first grade of primary school, and if he worked hard, he could directly take the second-grade exam, and he could skip to the third grade before the age of seven. As Gu Ailing mentioned in her class speech at the age of 13:
"I think I'm a little different, I'm busy on the little ramp while kids my age are still crying and complaining."
Fortunately, Gu Ailing avoided Lila's original family environment. In "My Genius Girlfriend", Lila's brother Reno supports Lila's education despite the fact that she strives for her sister's schooling opportunities and even endures the domestic violence of being slapped by her father every time. Even Reno, who had been helping his father's shoe shop from six a.m. to eight o'clock in the evening, advocated for a salary so that his sister could continue to go to school:
"If you pay me, I'll give her a study."
However, in the family environment where Lila grew up, her brother's unconditional support could not change her sister's fate, and after graduating from elementary school, Lila had to go to her father's shoe repair shop to help out like her brother.
In contrast, Gu Ailing's family growth environment is like another character in "My Genius Girlfriend": although Elena is not liked or even disliked by her mother, the reason why she can continue to stay in school is also due to her father's decision and her mother's absolute obedience to her father's decision, but at least in the family, she is the pearl in her father's hand, and she is liked by several younger brothers.
As far as the novel is concerned, Elena and Lila are two girls who want to get rid of their fate under the invisible huge force: one who relies on her own intelligence and early wisdom to constantly seek the best solution to the real conditions is a genius who grows up savagely; one with a relatively good family education environment, from step by step to lila secretly wrestling, and finally "success". They are like two vines that are constantly growing with the power of each other, antagonizing, and entangled, carving each other into their own lives.
These two vines, so stubbornly growing in decay and dilapidation and under the patriarchy of thick shadows, mirror each other and inspire each other, trying to get rid of poverty and rudeness. We may feel the lacklusterity of the story, because it more or less hides the familiar flavor of our childhood; we may feel the bluff of this writing, but the mysterious beginning leads to such a slow-paced memory. However, when we also recall our childhood, it is inevitable that we will not think of the loneliness of hiding in a hidden corner because we just want to be the best self in the eyes of the other party.
The sensitivity and simplicity of childhood will always use the mature words of grand betrayal and jealousy to annotate the simplicity of the world, just like Lila, although she said that she did not like the wreath of flowers and fruits that Enzo gave her, she still brought home, "personally nailed a nail in the window", hanging the catalpa on it, hoping to get the wreath, Elena felt a kind of betrayal.
2.
The novel, through the friendship of two little girls, shows the poor, dirty, and violent Naples. It is a microcosm of a lower-middle class society: the son of the shoemaker Ceruro is a shoemaker, the son of the carpenter Peluso is a mason, the son of capucho the unloader is a mechanic, the son of the petty trader Scano is a petty trader, the son of the butcher owner Karachi sits in the butcher's business... No one is much better than anyone else.
Stills from "My Genius Girlfriend"
In these middle- and lower-class families, there is another possibility: they all have a daughter or son in school, or the same class, or the same school, and the quality of grades and choices for the future have become important factors affecting their families. According to this line of thinking, the inner volume of middle and lower class society begins. We all know that this so-called "inner volume" in the novel is actually nothing more than "lingering", and it is another invisible force that determines this factor: patriarchy or patriarchy.
The competitiveness between elementary school students is not a success or failure in the eyes of adults, like "Lila and I have never spoken, but we are bolder than anyone." "Lila's way of doing things, Elena's following suit, and there is even a feeling that this whole childhood is a spiritual PUA of Lila to Elena:
It's also possible that this is how I deal with jealousy and hatred, suppress those feelings, or say that it's a disguise for my inferiority and the charm I feel. Of course, I easily put up with Lila's bullying and her bullying.
Throughout the story, Lila is like a creator, a mythical figure, and the author arranges two little girls with different fates in life, entangled and inseparable, like Sophocles or Ovid, hoping to explore a topic of fate. Thus unfolded, and this entangled fate led them down different paths. However, the author does not give a clear answer to the topic, and this is not the responsibility that the novel should bear.
In the whole childhood chapter described in this novel, everything seems to be familiar to us: the "war" between boys and girls, the secret competition between good students, the "swearing" of excellence to teachers and other students with grades, and the different attitudes of teachers to different students, parents' concepts of children's education... It may also be because the plot is not new, and the narrative is protracted, it is inevitable that people will not feel that the long childhood gives people a feeling of "practical boredom" and "spiritual childishness".
This reading experience is mostly due to the mysterious opening and long time span, which makes the reader somewhat impatient: the successful Elena receives a call from Reno, the son of her childhood friend Lila, saying that his mother has disappeared completely. This leads to Elena's memories of Lila's prophecy of fate, and she writes the story of their lives...
What the reader did not expect was that such a mysterious opening led to a story written in childhood, and the protagonist of the story, Lila, her son was already a confused year, and the long time span dissipated the reader's enthusiasm for unveiling the mysterious opening. The childhood part of the novel is also not new, and the only thing that can touch the reader is the author's feelings about the childhood past from the perspective of an adult:
Blood, usually after a fierce quarrel and a dirty insult, comes out of the wound, and things always come in this order.
"Before" – Lila usually uses this phrase, whether at school or outside, and I don't think she cares about what happened before us. The previous things are usually things that are not clear, and the adults do not say it, or they also flash their words. It seems that Lila cares more about whether there is a so-called "before" in the end. At the time, that was what upset her, and even bothered her.
I never felt that the life we had was bad, life was like this, it was normal. One of the responsibilities we learn as we grow up is that we have to make other people's lives harder before they make our lives harder.
Adults writing about childhood will inevitably not carry the deep-rooted and weighing pros and cons of adults, even if they are naïve out of nature in childhood, they are somewhat twisted, like a naïve old woman sitting under the sunset looking back at the irreparable glory of the past. Whether it's Lila looking for the feared Archiller Karachi to get back the toys he had taken, or whether they are taken by Mr. Oliviero to other classes to engage in various forms of learning competitions, the psychological depictions of these children are always free from mature and sophisticated thoughts.
The novel's childhood, which ends with skipping school as a way out of the city where they live—despite the fact that there are still elementary school exams and the terrible don Achille being killed in his own home one afternoon in August—leads to the passage that I remember fondly:
The tunnel entrance was very dark and we never went in. We walked in hand in hand. It was a long passage, and the light at the exit seemed far away from us. Later, our eyes got used to the darkness of the tunnel, we heard our own footsteps, very loud, and saw that there were streams of water flowing down the walls of the tunnel, shiny, and there were large pieces of water on the ground, and we walked very carefully. At this time, Lila shouted, and then laughed, and her voice seemed to explode, and the echo was very loud. Then I shouted and laughed. We've been yelling along the way, sometimes together, sometimes each shouting: laughing and screaming, shouting and laughing. We were glad to hear the echo of our shouts, the nervousness was relieved, and we began our trip.
The Reader
This is also the passage shared by Gu Ailing in "Readers". It has to be said that without this paragraph, all the foreshadowing and nagging of the first part of the novel before this would lose its meaning. This tunnel has a metaphor of fate:
When we came out of the tunnel, we saw a straight road with no end in sight.
For both the reader and the two girls in the story, childhood seems too long. And this paragraph corresponds to Gu Ailing's own sentence: to find the passion of life, this is my way of life, but also my definition of life.
3.
In the first half of the book, the author uses the position of the teacher Oliviero, through the "Blue Fairy" written by Lila as a guide, and plants a seed in Elena's heart that has not yet escaped from the state of ignorance: the common people.
A few days later, I carefully asked the teacher if he had watched "The Blue Fairy." She answered me in an unusual tone—very cryptic, as if only the two of us could really understand—"Do you know what a commoner is?" Greco. "Yes, the commoners of the Roman Empire, there were civil rights defenders of the common people at that time." "Being a commoner is a terrible thing." "Yes." "If a person wants to be a commoner all the time, then his children and grandchildren will be like grass and mustard, and it is not worth mentioning." You don't care about Cyrulo, think about it for yourself. ”
Neither the teacher nor the author is here to deal with the "common people". Until the end of the whole story, the seed buried in Elena's heart, the "common people", was finally able to break through:
"Do you know what a commoner is?" "Know, teacher." At that moment, I knew better what a commoner was, more clearly than when Teacher Oliviero asked me a few years ago. We are the common people, the common people are competing for food and wine, they are quarreling over the order of serving, whether the service is good or bad, it is the dirty floor on which the waiter is walking around, the increasingly vulgar toasts. The commoner was my mother, and she drank wine, and now her whole back was resting on my father's shoulder. My father was serious, and my mother was smiling with her mouth wide open, because the antique dealer in Florence had made an obscene remark. Everyone was laughing, including Lila, who looked like she was going to role-play herself to the end.
Although Elena escaped from poverty, squalor, and violence through reading, and became famous after going to college, writing a book, and marrying into a middle-class family, we all lived until Elena lived in the shadow of insecurity, or in other words, under Lila's back.
When playing with Lila as a child, she would imitate Lila:
We can put Tina and No' toys on the cement floor on the edge of the barbed wire, "Tina" is my rag doll's name, and Lila's doll is called "No" We'd put some pebbles, champagne stoppers, and glass shards next to the dolls. What Lila said to No, I would whisper to Tina, but I would say it differently. If she put a wine bottle stopper on her rag doll's head, as if she were putting a hat on her doll, I would say in dialect to my doll, "Tina, put on your queen's crown, or you'll catch a cold." "If Noe were to play the game of jumping lattice in Lila's arms, I would let Tina play it too."
In terms of learning, Elena willingly accepted Lila's first place, she studied hard and worked hard to improve, in order to keep up with the girl, the terrible, dazzling girl:
I did my best, not to be number one – I didn't think I could do it, but not to fall third, fourth, or last. I studied very hard, and in addition to studying, I was also involved in a lot of difficult things, those things that were far away from me, just to keep up with the girl, the terrible, dazzling girl.
Even after Elena's first book was published, she was always concerned about what people thought about her book. When she saw a criticism of her book published in the newspaper one day, her confidence would disappear in an instant; when the next day there was an affirmative opinion of her work in the newspaper, she suddenly became confident again. However, when Elena stumbled upon Lila's Blue Fairy, which she had treasured earlier, she found that her novel was based on The Blue Fairy.
Until old age, 58-year-old Elena, the successful Elena, the children and grandchildren of Elena, recalled the past in the fourth part of the "Neapolitan Quadrilogy" with "My Genius Girlfriend", "Missing Children", and summed up her life like this:
My whole life was just a vulgar struggle to improve my social status.
When Gu Ailing recounted the excerpt of "My Genius Girlfriend" in "The Reader", I believe that Gu Ailing can really feel the growth path of two girls with very different fates in this novel: sorry for it, but secretly happy.