MAYBE A LITTLE less compelling than the first--longer, more diffuse--but only a little less. I'm still fascinated, and still uncertain what the springs of the fascination are.
A couple of guesses:
(1) If Knausgaard is the Proust de nos jours by virtue of his willingness to look microscopically at a moment, to break down the event of a few minutes into its every component, then perhaps Ferrante is an alternate Proust de nos jours by virtue of her patience and nuance in presenting the longue durée of our relationships over a lifetime. A person's life intersects tellingly with another person's at one time, then their lives diverge, then their lives intersect again, the new encounter both containing the relationship's history but also posing new terms. That feeling in Á la Recherche when a character we haven't seen for perhaps a hundred pages breaks on the horizon again, recognizable but changed... Ferrante is good at that. (This could also be called a soap-opera-like element, I concede, but I am sticking with Proust.)
(2) As far as I have read, the whole heart of the series is just such a relationship, as Lila's and Lénu's lives converge, diverge, then converge again, with each convergence containing its own mix of reaffirmation of their history and challenges to the assumptions of the friendship. What fascinates me in this relationship is its flipping of the ordinary idea of what living a life is for. Lénu, in ordinary terms, is the success story--she got out, she got a degree, she saw places, she meet new people, she is starting to gain recognition for her writing--but it is Lila who (to Lénu) is the one living the more spirited, more brilliant, more passionate life...Lila who never got out of Naples and was shipwrecked twice, on the rocks of a bad early marriage and in the whirlpool of a tragic affair. Lena goes from accomplishment to accomplishment, Lila from disaster to disaster, yet it is Lénu who feels she is never catching up.
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