Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay: middle age (Neapolitan Quartet, 3)

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In speaking about pettiness we are not making a value claim: we are making a significance claim. Pettiness is important, but it is not necessarily good. It is not, as we have said, ennobling. Terrible people use it to terrible ends; brilliant people use it to brilliant ends. But assuming that pettiness is something that critics can “get over” on their way to “knowledge” is a mistake, and it is partly a mistake because “getting over pettiness” repeats the very political, often misogynistic, blindness it aims to reveal. In a better world maybe we wouldn’t need pettiness. But that seems not to be where we live. Shulevitz, Judith (2015-09-12). "The Hypnotic Genius of Elena Ferrante". The Atlantic . Retrieved 2023-02-27. The story continues from the point where the previous book stopped, we are reminded that the story is recounted by sixty-six years old Lenu, with her distance and experience. Lenu is drawn into the new cultured world of her fiancé’s family, she’s dazed and fascinated by it and at the same time feels uncertain, constantly seeking approval, making sure she is fits in, meets the expectations. She prepares to get married and move to Florence, happy to leave the neighborhood behind; she promotes her book. It seems Lenu is finally able to exist on her own, until Lila summons her. With Elena’s assistance, Lila receives medical care, and is able to move with Enzo and her son to a better apartment closer to the neighborhood. Adele Airota connects Enzo with a computer expert, and as the narrative progresses he and Lila both are given better jobs that pay excellent wages. Towards the end of the story, Lila takes a job working for Michele Solara, who has above all things sought to control Lila. It is a tenuous partnership. For Lila, the story ends with Michele’s mother’s murder; the stage is set for the chaos of the fourth novel. As you can see the books were published in sequence annually, as they were supposed to be read one a year. I went for it & read the whole series, with a small break after Book 2, and completed the series at the end of February 2016.

In season three of the TV series that focus on the headiness of the times leads to multiple moments where Elena’s joy over the success of her first novel is undercut by all the critics and Naples neighbors who are preoccupied by the book’s frank sex scenes—confirming some of her old rivals’ impressions of her as “impure.” (One of the boorish boys she grew up with tries to hit on her, saying, “Let me get close to you; you’ll be able to write about it.”) And while Elena is coping with rude comments and not-so-subtle aspersions about her reputation, Lila is working at a literal sausage factory, where the men feel free to tell dirty jokes and to pressure her for sex when they get her alone. Virginia Woolf once called George Eliot’s Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” The same thing could be said of Elena Ferrante’s rich, engrossing, gloriously uncompromising third book in the bestselling Neapolitan series, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. Like Middlemarch, it is a bildungsroman written by a woman about a woman. Ferrante’s Elena Greco, an intelligent and unhappily married writer in 1960s Naples, bears some traces of Dorothea Brooke’s intelligence and unhappy wifehood. Like Middlemarch, Those Who Leave also has a kind implacability, like an Old Testament flood sweeping through the plains of human experience, drenching anyone who would dare to call it mere “women’s literature.” Jenny Turner, " The Secret Sharer. Elena Ferrante's existential fiction", Harper's Magazine, October 2014. Storia del nuovo cognome, L'amica geniale volume 2 (2012; English translation: The Story of a New Name, 2013). OCLC 829451619. [36] Unchained and untamed: women who left Turkey for Europe in the early emigration period (1960-1970s)Fischer, Molly (September 4, 2014). "Elena Ferrante and the Force of Female Friendships". The New Yorker. The tension between Lila and Lenu is often considered the central point of the novels, as Matteo Pericoli wrote for The Paris Review: "From a structural point of view, tension and compression often meld into each another. In this building, two volumes are interwoven by strong connecting rods, extended columns and daring beams, with one of the two seemingly suspended from the other. With its mass and swirled dynamism, the suspended volume (that we will call Lila) seems to be slipping away from the one that is holding it up (that we will call Elena) making it extend and stretch as if it was Lila that was shaping Elena and providing her with her dynamic energy, so vital to any piece of architecture." [7] The Story of the Lost Child; won the 2016 ALTA Translation Prizes, in the category translations form Italian. [28] I really, really liked Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, which is an incredibly blase way to compliment a book so raw and confrontational and, well, brilliant. The remaining three books in the Neapolitan Novels series build on the strong momentum established by the first and, in the process, continue to be some of the most poignant reading I’ve experienced in ages. The feelings that these books provoked in me were strong and visceral, inflamed and tender in their ebb and flow. These are not feel-good stories, but they don’t feel gratuitous in their misery, either. As a woman, my vicarious anger has an undercurrent of resignation, because each injustice and pointed strike at Lila and Elena — the character — (but also, all of the other Neapolitan women in the books) rings a little too true to feel like emotional manipulation. By the time he reappears in the novel, Nino could pretty much come into Elena and her dull husband Pietro’s living room, fart loudly, and she’d run off with him. He’s Nino, the hot intellectual ladies’ man. (Everything’s exciting when he’s around and empty when he’s not and Nino Nino Nino, sigh.) But that’s not what he does! No, Nino seduces Elena (if one can call it that, given her preexisting decades-long infatuation, this despite his liaison with her best friend) by appealing to her professional ambition. He does some swooping in of his own and declares – and he’s not wrong – that Pietro has asked to much of Elena in the domestic sphere, putting his own work first and leaving her to squander her (superior, Nino notes, again accurately) intellect.

Leaving Pietro for Nino isn’t really about creative self-realization… except it kind of is, because Nino inspires her to write. But does she care what Nino thinks about her work because she’s admired his brains since they were kids and respects his opinion, or because Nino Is Sex? While each of her novels is uniquely beguiling, they interrogate a shared set of concerns and obsessions, with bracing narrative frankness. The cumulative effect of her oeuvre is that of reading the distillation of someone’s deepest, most furtive thoughts. According to The Guardian, this tension goes beyond the relation between Lila and Lenu, encompassing all women in the narrative: "Ferrante's subject – it is almost an obsession – is the way women are shaped, distorted and sometimes destroyed by their social milieu (and by the men around them). Voicing what can still seem unvoiceable, she delves into the darker tensions between daughters and mothers, the tug-and-pull of being a wife or a mother and wanting to retain some sense of independent self." [9] Motherhood and ambivalence [ edit ] Darrin Franich has called the novels the series of the decade, saying: "The Neapolitan Novels are the series of the decade because they are so clearly of this decade: conflicted, revisionist, desperate, hopeful, revolutionary, euphorically feminine even in the face of assaultive male corrosion." [22]

Billington, Michael (March 14, 2017). "My Brilliant Friend review – triumphant staging of Elena Ferrante's quartet". The Guardian. Elena reflects, at one point, on whether or not she ever harbored sexual feelings for her friend, admitting that she admired her body yet concluding, chillingly, “we would have been beaten to death.” The threat of violence over their childhoods precluded any sort of experimentation. But Elena is beguiled by Lila’s sexuality, by her teenage marriage and passionate affair. In one of his first conversations with Elena in Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Nino bitterly tells her that Lila is “really made badly: in her mind and in everything, even when it comes to sex.” Elena becomes obsessed with those words, at once viciously glad to hear of Lila’s failing and terrified that she will receive the same censure. This is the tension of the sign of “woman”: that it is out of scale, simultaneously universal and particular, simultaneously useful and an obstacle, outmoded. We have to talk about it, and yet can’t: the reasons we can’t are always already undone by the misogynistic structures that adhere white women to patriarchy and also give a gendered form to the basic selfish pettiness of the human, beyond gender. Gender has never been the “best that is known or thought.” This has historically almost always been a problem for criticism. And yet in the Neapolitan novels, it is also an opportunity.