The Neapolitan Novels полностью

I went to the bookstore terrified. The room was full, I went in with my eyes down. I thought I would faint with emotion. Adele greeted many of those present, they were friends and acquaintances of hers. She sat in the first row, gave me encouraging looks, turned occasionally to talk to a woman of her age who was sitting behind her. Until that moment I had spoken in public only twice, forced to by Franco, and the audience then was made up of six or seven of his friends who smiled with understanding. The situation was different now. I had before me some forty refined, cultivated strangers who stared at me in silence, with an unfriendly gaze; it was in large part the prestige of the Airotas that compelled them to be there. I wanted to get up and run away.

But the rite began. An old critic, a university professor much esteemed in his time, said as many good things about the book as possible. I couldn’t understand his speech, I thought only of what I was to say. I fidgeted in my chair, I had a stomachache. The world had vanished into chaos, and I couldn’t find within myself the authority to call it back and put it in order again. Yet I pretended self-assurance. When it was my turn, I spoke without really knowing what I was saying, I talked in order not to be silent, I gesticulated too much, I displayed too much literary knowledge, I made a show of my classical education. Then silence fell.

What were those people in front of me thinking? How was the critic and professor beside me evaluating my remarks? And was Adele, behind her air of cordiality, repenting her support of me? When I looked at her I realized immediately that my eyes were begging her for the comfort of a nod of approval and I was ashamed. Meanwhile the professor touched an arm as if to calm me, asked the audience for questions. Many stared in embarrassment at their knees, the floor. The first to speak was an older man with thick eyeglasses, well known to those present but not to me. At simply hearing his voice, Adele had an expression of annoyance. The man talked for a long time about the decline of publishing, which now looked more for money than for literary quality; then he moved on to the marketing collusion between critics and the cultural pages of the dailies; finally he focused on my book, first ironically, then, when he cited the slightly risqué pages, in an openly hostile tone. I turned red and rather than answer I mumbled some banal comments, off the subject. Until I broke off, exhausted, and stared at the table. The professor-critic encouraged me with a smile, with his gaze, thinking that I wanted to continue. When he realized that I didn’t intend to, he asked curtly: “Anyone else?”

At the back a hand was raised.

“Please.”

A tall young man, with long, unruly hair and a thick black beard, spoke in a contemptuously polemical way of the preceding speaker, and, a few times, even of the introduction of the nice man who was sitting next to me. He said we lived in a provincial country, where every occasion was an opportunity for complaining, but meanwhile no one rolled up his sleeves and reorganized things, trying to make them function. Then he went on to praise the modernizing force of my novel. I recognized him most of all by his voice, it was Nino Sarratore.

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The Cerullo family (the shoemaker’s family):

Fernando Cerullo, shoemaker, Lila’s father. He wouldn’t send his daughter beyond elementary school.

Nunzia Cerullo, Lila’s mother. Close to her daughter, but without sufficient authority to support her against her father.

Raffaella Cerullo, called Lina, or Lila. She was born in August, 1944, and is sixty-six when she disappears from Naples without a trace. A brilliant student, at the age of ten she writes a story titled The Blue Fairy. She leaves school after getting her elementary-school diploma and learns to be a shoemaker.
She marries Stefano Carracci at a young age and successfully manages first the grocery store in the new neighborhood and then the shoe store in Piazza dei Martiri. During a vacation on Ischia she falls in love with Nino Sarratore, for whom she leaves her husband. After the shipwreck of her relationship with Nino and the birth of her son Gennaro (also called Rino), Lila leaves Stefano definitively when she discovers that he is expecting a child with Ada Cappuccio. She moves with Enzo Scanno to San Giovanni a Teduccio and begins working in the sausage factory belonging to Bruno Soccavo.

Rino Cerullo, Lila’s older brother, also a shoemaker. With his father, Fernando, and thanks to Lila and to Stefano Carracci’s money, he sets up the Cerullo shoe factory. He marries Stefano’s sister, Pinuccia Carracci, with whom he has a son, Ferdinando, called Dino. Lila’s son bears his name, Rino.

Other children.