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

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Near the beginning of Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the third installment in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, our narrator, Elena Greco, encounters her own novel in a bookshop: “ I was there, exposed, and seeing myself caused a violent pounding in my chest. I felt that not only in my book but in novels in general there was something that truly agitated me, a bare and throbbing heart.” 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. My Brilliant Friend". International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Archived from the original on 2015-07-22. Central themes in the novels include women's friendship and the shaping of women's lives by their social milieu, sexual and intellectual jealousy and competition within female friendships, and female ambivalence about filial and maternal roles and domestic violence. Isabelle Blank wrote about the complex, mirrored relation between the protagonists Lenu and Lila: "Lenù and Lila are foils for one another. Lenù is blonde, studious, eager to please, self-doubting and ambitious, whereas Lila is dark, naturally brilliant, mercurial, mean and irresistible to those around her. The story is told from Lenù’s point of view, but the two friends understand one another on such a deep and complex level that the reader is often privy to Lila's perceived inner thoughts." [6]

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] Part of the bestselling saga about childhood friends following different paths by “one of the great novelists of our time” ( The New York Times). So on the one hand, Nino sees Elena’s marriage for what it is, and appeals to her resentment at years of being treated like an intellectual inferior. On the other – as the somewhat hindsight-possessing older-Elena narrator is aware – Nino’s an expert at grand passion. He knows just what to say to women to inspire them to drop everything and run off with them, and has unclaimed children all across Italy to show for it. There’s this moment when it looks as if Elena will leave Pietro in favor of independence and being single for a while and that seems like an excellent idea, but when did great fiction ever limit itself to good decision-making?And maybe that’s what makes the Neapolitan novels so wonderful, apart from the obvious (that is, the combination of a sweeping portrait of society and intricate portrayals of the moment-by-moment emotional lives of the characters). Desires – for artistic achievement, material comfort, sex – exist in unpredictable, intertwined ways. Then again, Ferrante’s entire literary career, stretching over the past quarter of a century, could be seen as a study of the boundary line between doing and redoing. In a letter to Sandra Ozzola, her Italian publisher and one of the founders of Europa Editions, Ferrante writes:

Moylan, Brian (February 9, 2016). "Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels set for TV adaptation". The Guardian. Roxborough, Scott (September 3, 2018). "HBO's Big Italian Bet With 'My Brilliant Friend' ". The Hollywood Reporter . Retrieved September 7, 2018. Luzzi, Joseph (September 27, 2013). "It Started in Naples: Elena Ferrante's 'Story of a New Name' ". The New York Times . Retrieved July 20, 2015. The Story of a New Name takes place immediately after Lila’s marriage to the neighborhood grocer, the young man in charge of one of only two of the neighborhood’s prosperous families. Getting bogged down in the details of the plot of each book is kind of missing the point, so I will try to avoid doing it, but I mention the marriage because this is the single moment that changes the two women’s lives. It is the first and most concrete piece of evidence that the lives they are “meant” to have, as women, are not for them. Lila begins chafing at her vows and new identity (her new name) before the ceremony is even over, and the rest of this installment is, for her, about how she struggles to carve out necessary freedoms for herself, both inside and outside of her marriage. Meanwhile, Elena has left the neighborhood to attend secondary school and university. Academically, there is no denying her talent, but she has what we would, now, instantly identify as impostor syndrome, in spades, and she is nearly undone on multiple occasions by a crippling sense of inauthenticity. When she speaks among her educated friends, she always feels like she is pretending at intelligence, only hiding her poor vulgarity; when she as at home in Naples she simultaneously desires to impress with her accomplishments and be accepted as one of them, unchanged. It’s the story of moving within of two communities, but not truly being a part of either.The Story of the Lost Child; won the 2016 ALTA Translation Prizes, in the category translations form Italian. [28] Colonial traces of emigration aspirations among Filipinos and its impact in contemporary Philippines The Story of the Lost Child: nominated for the Strega Prize, the most prestigious Italian literary award. Storia del nuovo cognome, L'amica geniale volume 2 (2012; English translation: The Story of a New Name, 2013). OCLC 829451619. [36] 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.

In Florence, Lenù runs into Nino again when her husband Pietro brings him home. She discovers she is still attracted to him despite the fact that he abandoned her friend after their love affair. She feels inspired by Nino, who seems to recognize her intellect and blames Pietro for letting her be wasted by a routine with small children. Inspired by this, she writes a feminist text which Adele deems worthy of publication. She and Nino start an affair, which makes Elena realize how unhappy she is in her marriage.

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There seemed to us, thus, to be a mismatch between the novels’ dissatisfaction with public writing and the act of publicly writing about them. As critics tried—in essays, even in Facebook threads—to fit their encounters with the novels’ pettiness into critical forms, the pettiness lost its vitality, was in fact called out as petty, which was, in our experience, irritating. Virginia Fanny Faccenda (University Saint-Louis Bruxelles) and Mariam Camilla Rechchad (University of Turin) Elena plans to use birth control and start on a new novel, but her plans are derailed by an early pregnancy. Her new marriage is put to the test as both partners are struggling in their careers and dealing with a newborn. After the baby is finally weaned, Elena draws on inspiration from Lila’s life as a struggling factory worker to try a new novel; however, it only makes it as far as her mother-in-law Adele, who proclaims it poor, sensationalist writing. Elena’s fondness for her husband never makes it to the passion stage; he is devoted to their small family but is detached and dull. He shows no interest in Elena’s gifts, her career, or her devotion to politics. Their relationship begins to suffer. Another child comes along, this one easier than the first, and Elena continues to struggle with significance and her ego.

To the uninitiated, Elena Ferrante is best described as Balzac meets The Sopranos and rewrites feminist theory."— The Times Lenù tells Lila she plans to leave her husband to be with Nino, which horrifies her friend. Nino tells her he can't leave his wife, and Lenù decides to leave Pietro with or without him. The book ends when they board a plane together.The satisfaction of writing a piece like this is difficult to overstate. The exposure of Ferrante—and particularly the smug tone that exposure took—was something that made us angry, and yet writing an essay explaining why would not have resolved that feeling, partly because to write that essay would have been to enter into an argumentative exchange that would simply elicit more of the writing that angered us in the first place. Instead, our goal was to make a context in which even well-meaning exchange was disabled. Research on the migration-social reproduction nexus has been gaining more and more prominence in recent years. While many accounts are focused on female migrants’ role in host societies’ infrastructures and structures of care, less attention has been paid to the effects these circuits of migration have on sending countries, regions, and communities. We are interested in deepening these conversations with regards to the gendered consequences of emigration for structures and infrastructures of social reproduction at home. How do educational mobility, seasonal work and long-term emigration affect economies of care? What are the individual and collective challenges that the gendered character of emigration poses? This may be the last time I’ll talk about Lila with a wealth of detail. Later on she became more evasive, and the material at my disposal was diminished. It’s the fault of our lives diverging, the fault of distance. And yet even when I lived in other cities and we almost never met, and she as usual didn’t give me any news and I made an effort not to ask for it, her shadow goaded me, depressed me, filled me with pride, deflated me, giving me no rest. 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.”