April | 2022 | RMST 202 201

I’m not sure how to write this. I’m not sure what the correct wording to use here is because how do you write a concluding blog post?

To begin with, I enjoyed this course (really mundane start but hey! gotta begin somewhere!) especially because we learnt a lot about literature in the romantic era. I had already had an introduction to this in school but mostly through poems and little excerpts of novels, never to the extent we did in class.

Being candid, I stumbled across the course when I was looking through options for my literature requirement. I didn’t expect to be able to take a course that catered to my interests while fulfilling the requirements and when I found this course, I was intrigued by it. Signing up for it, I knew it would be literature focused but not to the extent it was and it was a pleasant surprise.

I didn’t contract for the highest grade like I’m sure most people did because I had a bit of a heavy course load and couldn’t have kept up with all the reading. But the books I read were eye opening, both in terms of literature from a bygone time and socio-economic situations during the eras the novels were set in. The fact that they were translated also gave me a different take on reading books because I found myself pausing several times over sentences in different novels, wondering how the author must have worded them in their native languages.

The class with Manea was undoubtedly my favourite because it was so new and a chance to almost go back in time and peel back the layers of the story he wrote, from the plot to the situation at the time. It was beyond fascinating to hear his life experiences and hear the way he connected them to his stories.

Thank you to our professor and TAs for the the great books and the opportunities we had throughout this class to discover and learn while journeying through various eras.

My last question is really simple: what was your favourite book that you read in this class?

I really enjoyed this book. Maybe the most interesting (hey, I’ve used this word in all my blogs so far, why break the trend now?) thing I found in this story was the relationship between Elena and Lila. With both of them beginning in a poor neighbourhood in 1950s Naples, there is an seemingly unbreakable bond forged between the two girls as they learn to care for and rely on each other. It is an unconventional friendship as is expected from less than comfortable beginnings but the reader sees the way it grows, contracting and expanding but never breaking as the girls grow, highlighting not only a girl’s journey into womanhood but also the growth of a nation while simultaneously focusing on the lesser known sides of friendship. Despite Elena being more financially stable and Lila not being as fortunate in the cards life dealt her, the initial discomfort and scrapes between the two clear up as they learn to navigate what seems, at the beginning, to be an unlikely friendship.

I did find myself wondering if maybe Lila was friends with Elena only for her money- after all, if she was, who could blame her, given her situation? ‘Desperate times call for desperate measures,’ as the old saying goes. But I think, despite her rough edges, Lila genuinely does care for Elena and Elena learns to look out for her friend too without pitying her. However, I wouldn’t say it’s a completely pure friendship, since both girls seem naturally inclined to compete with each other, tainting their bond with confusion and hurt to the point of being toxic at times.

I have to say, this was a good book to end the course with. Ferrante’s writing flows easily and while it is definitely not a light read in any way given the shocking nature of incidents such as the normalised violence against children, it is definitely enlightening about the circumstances the girls live in and what society was like in Italy then.

My question for the class is, how would you place Elena and Lila’s growth against the coming of age of the society and nation they live in?

RMST 202 201

Archives: April 2022

Conclusions