Review by New York Times Review
ELENA FERRANTE is one of the great novelists of our time. Her voice is passionate, her view sweeping and her gaze basilisk. Her subject is the domestic world, and part of her genius lies in her capacity to turn this sphere into an infernal region, full of rage and violence, unlimited in its intellectual and emotional reach. Ferrante's view of family life is anything but sentimental, anything but comforting. In fact, her writing is remarkable for its velocity and ruthlessness. Reading her is like getting into a fast car with Tony Soprano: At once you are caught up and silenced, rendered breathless, respectful. Ferrante is the author of six novels. Her most recently translated, "Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay," is the third in a Neapolitan series that began with "My Brilliant Friend" and "The Story of a New Name." The books (impeccably translated by Ann Goldstein) track the lives of two women, Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo, born in Naples near the end of World War II. Their neighborhood, bone-scrape poor, is deeply and permanently infested by the verminous, lethal presence of the Camorra. These novels reveal the intersection of poverty and crime, and their effects on the lives of women. Narrated by Elena, now in her 60s, the series begins with the disappearance of Lila and goes on to recapitulate a lost history - one that Lila has tried to erase through vanishing, but that Elena stubbornly records. The two girls are schoolmates and close friends, though their friendship is complicated. They're both poor and intelligent, but Elena is a good girl, dutiful and responsible, Lila a bad one, bold and transgressive. Elena does well in the world, but Lila, not allowed to finish school, charts a path of dangerous defiance. The two women are counterparts, twinned and competitive, mirroring, challenging and absorbing each other's choices, each living a life that might have been the other's. It all starts innocently - little girls playing with dolls - but nothing is innocent here. Lila and Elena drop each other's dolls into a black cellar, where they vanish. Lila declares that Don Achille, the local Camorra chief, has taken them and insists on visiting him to ask for them back. Don Achille is a real criminal, and their meeting is neither funny nor charming. The shock of Ferrante's writing lies in troubling juxtapositions like this. Children are our private, most intimate and vulnerable selves; they should never meet criminals, those impersonal, brutal and destructive forces. In Ferrante's series this disturbing conjunction is continual: Crime affects every life, at every level. Ferrante's Naples is in thrall to the Camorra, which determines the girls' behavior toward their classmates (sucking up to Camorra kids), the jobs their boyfriends are allowed (maybe working as an attendant at a gas station on the stradone) and what the girls wear when they come back from a honeymoon (big sunglasses and voluminous scarves, to hide black eyes and bruises). In "Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay," Lila has married a rich young Camorra lord, had a child and separated from her husband. She's poor again, working at a nightmarish factory job. During the day, she leaves her son with the neighbors, watching him sink into the morass of ignorance and brutality. Elena has finished her studies at the university, written a critically successful book and become engaged to an academic. She 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. During the struggles of the 1970 s between the Communists and the Socialists she turns to politics, only to find that the Camorra rules here too. The violent demonstrations are controlled by thugs. Ferrante's writing style is simple and straightforward, headlong almost to the point of clumsiness. Consider this passage about Gigliola, a neighborhood girl who is about to marry Michele, a Camorra lord. Standing in her new apartment, she describes her plight to Elena: "Michele, she said, is never here, it's as if I were getting married by myself. And she suddenly asked me, as if she really wanted an opinion: Do you think I exist? Look at me, in your view do I exist? She hit her full breasts with her open hand, but she did it as if to demonstrate physically that the hand went right through her, that her body, because of Michele, wasn't there. He had taken everything of her, immediately, when she was almost a child. He had consumed her, crumpled her, and now that she was 25 he was used to her, he didn't even look at her anymore." He has sex "here and there as he likes.... In front of everyone he treats me like a rag for wiping the floor." The novel's pace is breakneck, packed with incident. The scenes are lit by emotion, as if struck by lightning. Ferrante herself is reclusive. (Google Images, asked for Ferrante, helpfully offers photographs of Meg Wolitzer and Elizabeth Strout.) Oddly, rumors claim that these books have actually been written by a man - perhaps because Ferrante's narrative is so troubling, not what we expect from a woman. Though haven't we learned anything from Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates? There are many ways to examine crime. The Camorra and the Mafia have long held a sinister and glamorous fascination. The Sopranos, with their vulgar, expensive suburban house and mostly ordinary family life, present a skewed version of the American dream, suggesting that the Mafia is simply an alternative form of authority. Ferrante reminds us that crime corrodes, that violence and dishonesty have a deep and permanent impact on society. She shows how they destroy the family, that most essential social unit; how the Camorra undermines the father's authority, the mother's love, the children's futures. In these bold, gorgeous, relentless novels, Ferrante traces the deep connections between the political and the domestic. This is a new version of the way we live now - one we need, one told brilliantly, by a woman. ROXANA ROBINSON is the author of nine books, most recently the novel "Sparta."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 7, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The third novel in Ferrante's Neapolitan series continues the engaging story of Elena and Lila, picking up where The Story of a New Name (2013) left off. While Lila is working to support her son following the failure of her marriage, Elena is enjoying the success of her best-selling novel. Though they have been disconnected for some time, when Lila collapses from exhaustion, Elena heeds her cry for help. Drawing strength from each other, they take on the terrible working conditions in the factory where Lila works. But their friendship continues to ebb and flow through marriages, affairs, children, and careers. Each has sought in her own way to escape the limitations of her upbringing, but while Lila does so from the confines of their rough Naples neighborhood, Elena's college degree and marriage into an affluent family open doors that take her farther away. Ferrante continues to imbue this growing saga with great magic, treating the girls' years of marriage and motherhood with breathtaking honesty while envisaging the turbulence of political and social unrest in 1970s Italy. Though originally planned as a trilogy, the story doesn't finish here, as this book ends with a hook that will leave readers eagerly awaiting the next installment.--Ophoff, Cortney Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Surpassing the rapturous storytelling of the previous titles in the Neapolitan Novels (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name), Ferrante here reunites Elena and Lil, two childhood friends, who dissect subjects as complicated as their own relationship, including feminism and class, men and women, mothers and children, sex and violence, and origin and destiny. As the narrative unfolds in the late 1960s and early '70s, the fiery Lila stays in Naples, having escaped an abusive marriage, and lives platonically with a man from the neighborhood, along with her young, possibly illegitimate son. The feisty Elena leaves town, graduates from a university in Pisa, publishes a successful book, marries an upper-class professor, and moves to Florence, where she gives birth to two daughters. Against the backdrop of student revolution and right-wing reaction, the two women's tumultuous friendship seesaws up and down as each tries to outdo the other. "You wanted to write novels," Lila tells Elena. "I created a novel with real people, with real blood, in reality." Are the two women less opposites than parts of a whole? The book concludes not with a duality but with a surprising new triangle involving Nino, another homegrown intellectual, who loves both women. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Starred Review. Rising far above the melodrama of a typical coming-of-age story, this third in Ferrante's four "Neapolitan Novels" (begun with My Brilliant Friend) exhibits keen intellectual curiosity and heartfelt passion as it continues to explore the lives of childhood friends Lina and Elena. It is now the late 1960s, and class struggle, poverty, extremist politics, and feminist ideas reverberate in the minds and souls of our protagonists, as revealed by narrator Elena, who has left the neighborhood to attend college and eventually publish a novel. Lena, meanwhile, married young and has left her husband, allowing for a rigorous exploration of love, marriage, separation, and the role of children. VERDICT Superbly translated, this tour de force shows off Ferrante's strong storytelling ability and will leave readers eager for the final volume of the series. An excellent choice for book clubs.-Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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). With Naples and the looming specter of Vesuvius once again forming the ominous background to the girls' lives, Elena travels from the city of her childhood, first to the university in Pisa, and then beyond upon her marriage to Pietro, the intellectual heir to an influential Milanese family. Lila's existence in Naples follows a more brutal and mundane course, but both young women are confronted with the social and political upheavals that echoed across Italy (and the world) during the late 1960s and early '70s. Always rivals as well as friends, Lila and Elena struggle to assert themselves in a landscape of shifting alliances and growing corruption in Naples as well as in a culture where women's desires almost never direct the course of family life. The domestic balancing acts performed by both womenone leading a life of privilege, one burdened by poverty and limited choiceilluminate the personal and political costs of self-determination. The pseudonymous Ferrantewhose actual identity invites speculation in the literary worldapproaches her characters' divergent paths with an unblinking objectivity that prevents the saga from sinking into melodrama. Elena is an exceptional narrator; her voice is marked by clarity in recounting both external events and her own internal dialogues (though we are often left to imagine Lila's thought process, the plight of the non-narrative protagonist). Goldstein's elegant translation carries the novel forward toward an ending that will leave Ferrante's growing cadre of followers wondering if this reported trilogy is destined to become a longer series. Ferrante's lucid rendering of Lila's and Elena's entwined yet discrete lives illustrates both that the personal is political and that novels of ideas can compel as much as their lighter-weight counterparts. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
