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

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Ferrante, masterful at describing bodies and bodily functions, has said that “we have to activate all our physical re­sources as writers and readers to make it function. Wri­ting and reading are great investments of physicality.” The chaotic passion of Elena and Nino’s first lovemaking is a physical release, accustomed as we are to Elena’s elegant and controlled style: Olga Onuch, Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Manchester, Principle Investigator of the Mobilise Project Development of entrepreneurial cultures in the sending and receiving countries: the role of migrant entrepreneurs Jenny Turner, " The Secret Sharer. Elena Ferrante's existential fiction", Harper's Magazine, October 2014.

Ada Cappuccio (Antonio's sister, helps her mother clean staircases, later works at the Carracci grocery shop) Book Genre: Contemporary, Cultural, European Literature, Feminism, Fiction, Historical, Historical Fiction, Italian Literature, Italy, Literary Fiction, Novels, Womens This sentence stages our most polemic claim—“taste is just another name for internalized misogyny”—as a truth claim at the foundation of an argument rather than the argument itself. More, the claim can’t hold, argumentatively: it is out of scale with itself. It contains a multitude of debatable assumptions about how taste, culture, gender, and even psychology work, yet we were uninterested in debating any of them. Because the very fact of having to debate them, carefully, with evidence and expertise, dissipates the deep feelings—of love, of irritation—that the covers cause us to feel and, importantly, what the discussion of the covers lead us to know but to know other than through agreed upon standards of argument. The knowledge, here, came from the accrued feeling of living for years in a world that finds a pastel aesthetic distasteful. Criticism’s carefulness would defuse the power of experience behind this claim. With the publication of her Neapolitan Novels, (Ferrante) has established herself as the foremost writer in Italy—and the world."— The Sunday Times The book’s center is Elena’s friendship with Lila, yet this woman-to-woman relationship is always threatened. The men in Lila’s life—kind Enzo, irresponsible yet brilliant Nino—spend more time with her than Elena does. Elena herself is walled off by her husband, the distracted and unappreciative Pietro, and only realizes, years into her marriage, that the confinement of womanhood has separated her from Lila, forcing them to compete for male attention. “We would have written together, we would have been authors together, we would have drawn power from each other, we would have fought shoulder to shoulder. The solitude of women’s minds is regrettable,” Elena says, reflecting sadly on her lifelong rivalry with Lila.

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Storia del nuovo cognome, L'amica geniale volume 2 (2012; English translation: The Story of a New Name, 2013). OCLC 829451619. [36] The novel was adapted by HBO and RaiTV in their series My Brilliant Friend. The content of this novels corresponds to the third season of the show, which aired in February 2022. [1] Plot [ edit ] The question the novels seek to answer—what happened to Lenù’s friendship with Lila?—is not a critical question; what went wrong is not a matter of reason or clarity. For what would it mean to evaluate a friendship in terms of “the best that is known?” How, in friendship, literature, and politics, do we evaluate what’s good, what’s interesting, what helps and what hurts? What standards guide our judgements, where do the standards come from, and whose power do they support or undercut?

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. Wood, James (January 21, 2013). "Women on the Verge: The fiction of Elena Ferrante". The New Yorker . Retrieved July 20, 2015. The series was also adapted for radio, produced by Pier for BBC Radio 4 and first broadcast in July 2016. This third volume of the Neopolitan trilogy continues to chronicle the turbulent lives of longtime friends Lila and Elena, as begun in the enigmatic Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (2012) and The Story of a New Name (2013). 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.

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Elena Ferrante's Naples: A Visual Promenade." Le Nouvel Observateur, October 28, 2016. A tour of the novels' Neapolitan settings. After ‘The Story of a New Name’ I needed a break, but I don’t give up easily, so after reading few other books I started on the third installment of the Neapolitan Novels. It was awesome, I devoured the book over a day and a half, I couldn’t stop reading it, I was annoyed when someone talked to me, I just wanted to be left alone and immerse myself. In the third book in the New York Times–bestselling Neapolitan quartet that inspired the HBO series My Brilliant Friend, Elena and Lila have grown into womanhood. Lila married at sixteen and has a young son; she has left her husband and the comforts her marriage brought and now works as a common laborer. Elena has left the neighborhood, earned her college degree, and published a successful novel, all of which has opened the doors to a world of learned interlocutors and richly furnished salons. Both women are pushing against the walls of a prison that would have seen them living a life of misery, ignorance, and submission. They are afloat on the great sea of opportunities that opened up for women during the 1970s. And yet, they are still very much bound to each other in a book that “shows off Ferrante’s strong storytelling ability and will leave readers eager for the final volume of the series” ( Library Journal).