Set in the late 1960s and the 1970s, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay continues the story of the feisty and rebellious Lila and her lifelong friend, the brilliant and bookish Elena. Lila, after separating from her husband, is living with her young son in a new neighbourhood of Naples and working at a local factory. Elena has left Naples, earned a degree from an elite college, and published a novel, all of which has opened the doors to a world of learned and fascinating interlocutors. The era, with its dramatic changes in sexual politics and social costumes, with its seemingly limitless number of new possibilities, is rendered with breathtaking vigour. This third Neapolitan Novel is not only a moving story of friendship but also a searing portrait of a rapidly changing world. The raindrops) played across the coast all through the night, until the soft new day shrugged itself awake, tried on amethyst and lavender for a while, and finally decided on pale yellow.” My Brilliant Friend effortlessly balances impossible questions about love, family, shame and duty, and it does so with impeccable style. This series is set in the early 70s and it really is a good-looking drama, cinematic in its ambitions, again taking its visual cues from a particular period of film history (this season’s director, Daniele Luchetti, has said he was inspired by John Cassavetes and 70s US cinema). Even a short scene of Lenù in a bookshop looks stunning, as does Lila walking across a factory floor, surrounded by strung-up animal carcasses. A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer's idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer's spells. They are carefully composed from symbolic expressions in arcane and esoteric programming languages that prescribe the tasks we want our processes to perform. In recent years I had begun to be interested in fashion, to educate my taste under Adele's guidance, and now I enjoyed dressing up. But sometimes - especially when I had dressed not only to make a good impression in general, but for a man - preparing myself (this was the word) seemed to me to have something ridiculous about it. All that struggle, all that time spent camouflaging myself when I could be doing something else. The colors that suited me, the ones that didn't, the styles that made me look thinner, those that made me fatter, the cut that flattered me, the one that didn't. A lengthy, costly preparation. Reducing myself to a table set for the sexual appetite of the male, to a well-cooked dish to make his mouth water.”

THOSE WHO LEAVE AND THOSE WHO STAY | Kirkus Reviews THOSE WHO LEAVE AND THOSE WHO STAY | Kirkus Reviews

Become. It was a verb that had always obsessed me...I wanted to become, even though I had never known what. And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition.” It is both a curious and strangely effective choice to continue with the actors who played Lila and Lenù as teenagers, even as they age into a more adult world and different lives. Gaia Girace (Lila) and Margherita Mazzucco (Lenù), who have been remarkable so far, are 18 and 19, and they look it. While they are dressed up to appear just a little older, with makeup and wigs, their obvious youth gives the effect of young women adrift in the world, and sometimes they look like children playing at adulthood. It shouldn’t work as well as it does, but it does – adding to the notion that they are searching for something, even if they don’t quite know what it is yet.Maybe there’s something mistaken in this desire men have to instruct us; I was young at the time, and I didn’t realize that in his wish to transform me was the proof that he didn’t like me as I was, he wanted me to be different, or, rather, he didn’t want just a woman, he wanted the woman he imagined he himself would be if he were a woman. For Franco, I said, I was an opportunity for him to expand into the feminine, to take possession of it: I constituted the proof of his omnipotence, the demonstration that he knew how to be not only a man in the right way but also a woman. And today when he no longer senses me as part of himself, he feels betrayed. I”

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay - Elena Ferrante

The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.” I” At home in Naples, she is called “superior” and told she has ideas above her station. Every single scene between Lenù and her mother is a mesmerising battle between cruelty and love. In Milan, she must watch on as young academic men are lauded for their brilliance. Lenù is trying to prove that she is a new person, at the same time as trying to work out what it is she wants to say, now that she has a voice with which to say it. My Brilliant Friend (Sky Atlantic) is the most beautiful drama on television, and, considering how consistently excellent it has been, it remains sorely underrated. This third season adapts the third of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and, for those who luxuriated in its first two seasons, it remains as gorgeous and seductive as ever.Finally, I spoke of the necessity of recounting frankly every human experience, including, I said emphatically, what seems unsayable and what we do not speak of even to ourselves.”

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay | Elena Ferrante Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay | Elena Ferrante

I said to myself that maturity consisted in accepting the turn that existence had taken without getting too upset, following a path between daily practices and theoretical achievements, learning to see oneself, know oneself, in expectation of great changes.”

The Independent’s list of alternative Man Booker Longlist titles: THOSE WHO LEAVE AND THOSE WHO STAY I feel like the knight in an ancient romance as, wrapped in his shining armor, after performing a thousand astonishing feats throughout the world, he meets a ragged, starving herdsman, who, never leaving his pasture, subdues and controls horrible beasts with his bare hands, and with prodigious courage.” May I point out something? You always use true and truthfully, when you speak and when you write. Or you say: unexpectedly. But when do people ever speak truthfully and when do things ever happen unexpectedly? You know better than I that it’s all a fraud and that one thing follows another and then another. I don’t do anything truthfully anymore, Lenù. And I’ve learned to pay attention to things. Only idiots believe that they happen unexpectedly.”