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

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If you’re looking for a series of books you can fall in love with, take a look at Elena Ferrante’s best-selling, four-book series of Neapolitan Novels. We noticed that the last book in the series, The Story of the Lost Child, made a lot of “Best Books of 2015” lists including NPR, the New York Times and O Magazine, so we decided to take a look for ourselves. The books also made our list of favorites. You’re in for a treat! Fischer, Molly (September 4, 2014). "Elena Ferrante and the Force of Female Friendships". The New Yorker. In the third book in the Neapolitan quartet, Elena and Lila, the two girls whom readers first met in My Brilliant Friend, have become women. 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 opportun

There’s nothing good here! Living alone in old age, narratives of loss, and transformations of belonging Markets and movements. Freedom of movement in the common market and effects on sending countries: win-win or dependency?Darrin Franich has called the novels the series of the decade, saying: "The Neapolitan Novels are the series of the decade because they are so clearly of this decade: conflicted, revisionist, desperate, hopeful, revolutionary, euphorically feminine even in the face of assaultive male corrosion." [22]

Soon to be an HBO series, book three in the New York Times bestselling Neapolitan quartet about two friends in post-war Italy is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted epic by one of today's most beloved and acclaimed writers, Elena Ferrante, “one of the great novelists of our time.” (Roxana Robinson, The New York Times) Wood, James (January 21, 2013). "Women on the Verge: The fiction of Elena Ferrante". The New Yorker . Retrieved July 20, 2015. 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). My Brilliant Friend is the first book in the series and it’s a modern masterpiece from one of Italy’s most acclaimed authors. My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante’s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and a touching meditation on the nature of friendship.Guardian Staff (2019-09-21). "The 100 best books of the 21st century". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 2019-11-08. We can’t stop talking about Elena Ferrante” we said to each other throughout 2016—on social media, in the classroom, in pressing the Neapolitan novels upon friends and relatives. This collection of essays on Ferrante emerges from a conference panel at the Modern Language Association convention in Philadelphia in January, 2017, convened by the Prose Fiction Division. The pseudonymous Italian writer, who chooses not to reveal herself beyond her writing, had come to new popularity in the US in the past few years, and we found we had a lot to say about feminism, rage, women’s friendships, genre clashes, and bad sex, amongst other topics. We still can’t stop talking about Ferrante, and we trust that when you read these lively, provocative essays, you too will join the chorus. 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. 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. 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

Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta, L'amica geniale volume 3 (2013; English translation: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, 2014). OCLC 870919836. Elena 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.

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Pietro represents everything she thinks she wants from life, Nino everything she thinks she wants to escape. Crucially, though, Nino is also entwined with Lila; she loved him, she had him, she lost him. Elena’s attraction to him is, equally, a desire to succeed where Lila failed. Virginia Woolf once called George Eliot’s Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” The same thing could be said of Elena Ferrante’s rich, engrossing, gloriously uncompromising third book in the bestselling Neapolitan series, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. Like Middlemarch, it is a bildungsroman written by a woman about a woman. Ferrante’s Elena Greco, an intelligent and unhappily married writer in 1960s Naples, bears some traces of Dorothea Brooke’s intelligence and unhappy wifehood. Like Middlemarch, Those Who Leave also has a kind implacability, like an Old Testament flood sweeping through the plains of human experience, drenching anyone who would dare to call it mere “women’s literature.” 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.