What Neapolitans Understand About Death - Better Than Most (Literary Hub)

Like most people, I’m afraid of death. I take calculated steps to talk about death without actually using the word. I sometimes skip songs like Buddy Holly’s That’ll be the Day or avoid driving down a street where I know there was a deadly car accident. I sometimes use friendlier, less anxiety-inducing words like “passed away” or “left this world.” As if the word “death” were—paradoxically—alive and, if I said it out loud or wrote it down, it would see me and chase me down.

As if, by talking about death, I’d be inviting it.

For the most part, in the Western countries where I’ve lived, I haven’t been alone in feeling this way. But among Neapolitans, I am.

How the Beatles created a sense of ‘place’ for this Argentinian American (TheWorld)

When I was 9 years old, just months after moving from Argentina to the US, I created my very own Beatles "radio show" with the only friend I had at the time. Her name was Valerie Jeannin — she lived down the street from me and she, too, loved the Beatles.

This was 1998 — years before podcasts were a thing and decades after the Beatles had broken up. I didn’t speak fluent English, nor did Valerie speak Spanish, but we spoke, in a way, a transnational language that only Beatles fans can understand: an undying love for the band and a knowledge of their entire album collection.

Memories of My Melancholy Ghost (Latino USA; Futuro Media)

Lucía Benavides is an Argentine-American journalist who moved from Texas to Barcelona to pursue a career as a foreign correspondent and freelance journalist. A year into her new life, she wasn’t getting any stories commissioned and she was also dealing with a breakup.

Lucía was sulking around her apartment when she got a text from a friend telling her that she lived in the apartment Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez had lived in when he first moved to Barcelona 50 decades earlier. That’s when spooky things started happening. Lucía decided to investigate her apartment’s mysterious past.

In Search of the Naples — and Women — of Ferrante’s Novels (LA Review of Books)

When I first read — no, devoured — Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend tetralogy in 2016, I loathed the narrator.

Elena Greco, or more commonly known as Lenù, is shy and adapting. I was more interested in Raffaella Cerullo, or Lila, who made scenes and called men uommen'e mmerd (literally “shit men” in Neapolitan).

I suppose my attraction to Lila made sense — I was going through a not-so-great time as a 27-year-old freshly out of a long-term relationship and as a woman in the United States on the brink of electing an openly misogynist, racist, and xenophobic president.

Like Lila, I was angry. And I was tired of being like Lenù. The world was changing. Enough with being patient.