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

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The series was praised by its portrayal of an intelligent young woman who finds motherhood stifling, something not often portrayed, as presented by Roxana Robinson for 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." [10] Class struggle [ edit ]

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: Rino Cerullo (Lila's older brother, five to seven years older than Lila, works at the family's shoe shop)One woman is always leaving the other behind, or, rather, “fleeing” her, as the original “fugge” of the Italian title puts it. First Elena left their grubby, provincial hometown to become a celebrated author, rising academic, and now the wife of a prominent young Florentine professor. But Lila is not to be outdone; although she has dropped out of school, remained poor, and been through a failed marriage, her ambitions remain. Soon Elena falls into postpartum depression and stalls in her career, while the unusually intelligent, still-beautiful Lila finds success as a factory technician and revolutionary voice in the politically agitated moment of 1968. Whoever is faltering in the given moment chases the other down to beg for her support, yet every conversation is inevitably tense, full of bluffing, accusations, and denials, because the balance of power could shift at any moment—a new reversal is often lurking just around the following corner of the sentence. At some point it becomes impossible to tell who is chasing whom. In all cases Ferrante remains ahead of her reader. 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’? Anonymous' author on international Man Booker longlist". BBC News. 2016-03-10 . Retrieved 2023-02-27. The Story of the Lost Child; won the 2016 ALTA Translation Prizes, in the category translations form Italian. [28]

Pericoli, Matteo (2017-04-17). "Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend". The Paris Review . Retrieved 2023-02-27. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is a 2013 novel written by Italian author Elena Ferrante. It is the third installment of her Neapolitan Novels, preceded by My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name, and succeeded by The Story of the Lost Child. It was translated to English by Ann Goldstein in 2014. 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]

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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: 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. The Neapolitan novels, narrated as they are by a woman who shares their author’s name and occupation, seem deliberately autobiographical. And so Fragments, a collection of Ferrante’s interviews and letters published electronically by Europa, is a fascinating double for Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, both voiced by an “I” named Elena who comments with uncanny resonance on what it means to be a novelist. But with Ferrante, of course, we must mistrust such easy correspondences. Indeed, there is a crucial difference between Elena Greco and Elena Ferrante: while the former writes, in part, to make hers a name “that would be charged with light for eternity,” the latter has managed, throughout her career, to remain completely anonymous. The name “Elena Ferrante” is as much a fiction as her character’s, untethered to even the most basic facts.

I think that’s the best way to read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels. They have been broken down into four separate books but they are really one novel. The cast of characters introduced in the first book has not grown much by the end of book three, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. The issues the main characters face are still basically the same, the conflicts introduced in childhood continue to haunt the narrator’s life in book three. This is a life story; life goes on. Ferrante's writing seems to say something that hasn't been said before, in a way so compelling its readers forget where they are, abandon friends and disdain sleep."— London Review of Books From pettiness to rape threats, obviously the underlying concern of this essay has been how gendered experience shapes criticism. Despite the fact that scholarship has worked for decades to describe how gender enters into criticism, it remains an unresolved question, and we would posit that this may be because the form of criticism itself disallows admission of the emotional experience in which gender most forcefully resides. Claiming that gender is an emotional experience is not at all to deny that is also an embodied, interpretive, and economic one—instead it is to say that all these conditions combine to generate an emotional state, and that often the state of those who fall under the sign “woman,” and who seek to speak about that experience, is one primarily of irritation: not quite a wound, but a rawness. (Perhaps that’s why so many of us spend so much money on salves.)Jenny Turner, " The Secret Sharer. Elena Ferrante's existential fiction", Harper's Magazine, October 2014. Nino Sarratore (their eldest son, two years older than Lila and Elena, as an adult is a professor and politically active)