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

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Storia della bambina perduta, L'amica geniale volume 4 (2014; English translation: The Story of the Lost Child, 2015). OCLC 910239891. It was praised for its portrayal of an intelligent young woman who finds motherhood stifling, a perspective not often portrayed, as argued by Roxana Robinson in The New York Times: "She (Elena) has joined the intelligentsia and is about to marry into the middle class, yet her life is still rife with limitations. Her distinguished husband is narrow-minded and restrictive, and she finds motherhood numbing." [2] 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.

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. Ferrante’s freshness has nothing to do with fashion…it is imbued with the most haunting music of all, the echoes of literary history.” — The New York Times Book ReviewElena 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. The author reflects on how formal and street-wise education impacts social change. The protagonist Elena Greco is a lower class Italian that rises to fame and fortune by being the first in her family to graduate from college. She is a writer. She is a thinker. In Ferrante’s story, Greco’s first book is published to wide acclaim for its depiction of a girl growing into a woman. Greco is struggling to find her way through middle life by writing a second book. She has a tumultuous relationship with her mother who secretly admires her daughter’s accomplishment and ability. She becomes engaged, marries a rising college professor, and bares two children. However, she grows to resent her husband’s intellectual beliefs and dominating self-interest.

The through-line in all of Ferrante’s investigations, for me, is nothing less than one long, mind-and-heart-shredding howl for the history of women (not only Neapolitan women), and its implicit j’accuse . . . Ferrante’s effect, critics agree, is inarguable. ‘Intensely, violently personal’ and ‘brutal directness, familial torment’ is how James Wood ventures to categorize her—descriptions that seem mild after you’ve encountered the work.” Colonial traces of emigration aspirations among Filipinos and its impact in contemporary Philippines The Neapolitan Novels, also known as the Neapolitan Quartet, are a four-part series of fiction by the pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante, published originally by Edizioni e/o, translated into English by Ann Goldstein, and published by Europa Editions (New York). The English-language titles of the novels are My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014), and The Story of the Lost Child (2015). In the original Italian edition, the whole series bears the title of the first novel L'amica geniale ("My Brilliant Friend"). The series has been characterized as a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story. [1] In an interview in Harper's Magazine, Elena Ferrante has stated that she considers the four books to be "a single novel" published serially for reasons of length and duration. [2] The series has sold over 10 million copies in 40 countries. [3] Pietro Airota, Lenù's husband, and father to Dede and Elsa. A young professor at the university, he believes his career and intellect are superior to his wife's, which she comes to resent. At the end of the novel, she leaves him for Nino Sarratore.Billington, Michael (March 14, 2017). "My Brilliant Friend review – triumphant staging of Elena Ferrante's quartet". The Guardian.

Reclusive Author Elena Ferrante Talks 'My Brilliant Friend' HBO Adaptation". The Hollywood Reporter. 16 October 2018. An intoxicatingly furious portrait of enmeshed friends Lila and Elena, Bright and passionate girls from a raucous neighborhood in world-class Naples. Ferrante writes with such aggression and unnerving psychological insight about the messy complexity of female friendship that the real world can drop away when you’re reading her.” The relationship between migration and kinship enjoys a long scholarly tradition and attention. How does the emigration of family members affect the personal and social biographies of those left behind? How do those who stay behind justify their choice: to emigrate or not to emigrate. To what extent is it useful to talk about emigration as a ‘personal choice’?Robinson, Roxana (2014-09-05). "Between Women". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 2023-02-28. Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels] don’t merely offer a teeming vision of working-class Naples, with its cobblers and professors, communists and mobbed-up businessmen, womanizing poets and downtrodden wives; they present one of modern fiction’s richest portraits of a friendship.” The latter is certainly felt in the novel’s bold turns to the future, and its motion of “fleeing” old ruins. Through her characters’ travels and travails, it could be said, Ferrante sings of arms and the woman. Elena struggles throughout Those Who Leave to find the courage to live and write again after enduring a dismissive husband and the widespread panning of her second novel. Through her, Ferrante has also broken through a wall of sorts, and though there is a tone of bitterness throughout the novel, it closes in a fire of triumphant exultation, not merely “fleeing” but taking flight. “I wanted to become, even though I had never known what,” Ferrante writes. Melina Cappuccio (the mad woman, in love with Donato Sarratore, cleans the neighborhood's buildings' staircases)

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). Lenù had planned not to have children right away, but discovers too late that Pietro did not agree with that plan. She becomes pregnant in her honeymoon, giving birth to her daughter Adele (Dede), named after Pietro's mother. Two years later she has her second daughter, Elsa. At home with two young girls, Lenù has a hard time writing, and feels trapped and allienated. She manages at cost to write another book, based on her and Lila's childhood in Naples, but after Adele, Pietro's mother and her editor, judges the book to have no merit, she abandons the project. Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. There’s nothing good here! Living alone in old age, narratives of loss, and transformations of belonging

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay Audiobook Summary

One of the most astounding—and mysterious—contemporary Italian novelists available in translation, Elena Ferrante unfolds the tumultuous inner lives of women in her thrillingly menacing stories of lost love, negligent mothers and unfulfilled desires.”