Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (Neapolitan Novels 3)
Elena Ferrante, 2013 (trans. 2014)
Europa Editions
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781609452339
Summary
Since the publication of My Brilliant Friend, the first of the Neapolitan novels, Elena Ferrante’s fame as one of our most compelling, insightful, and stylish contemporary authors has grown enormously. She has gained admirers among authors and critics. But her most resounding success has undoubtedly been with readers, who have discovered in Ferrante a writer who speaks with great power and beauty of the mysteries of belonging, human relationships, love, family, and friendship.
The incredible story continues in book three of the critically acclaimed Neapolitan Novels!
In this third Neapolitan novel, 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 have attempted 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 opportunities that opened up during the nineteen-seventies.
Yet they are still very much bound to each other by a strong, unbreakable bond. (From the publisher.)
Books in the series
My Brilliant Friend (2011) is the first of Ferrante's four Neapolitan Novels. The Story of a New Name (2012) is the second, this book is the third, and The Story of a Lost Child (2014) is the last.
Author Bio
Elena Ferrante is the pen-name of an Italian novelist whose true identity is not publicly known. Though heralded as the most important Italian novelist of her generation, she has kept her identity secret since the publication of her first novel in 1992.
Works
Ferrante is the author of a half dozen novels, the most well-known of which is Days of Abandonment. Her four "Neapolitan Novels" revolve around two perceptive and intelligent girls from Naples who try to create lives for themselves within a violent and stultifying culture. The series consists of four novels: 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), which was nominated for the Strega Prize, an Italian literary award.
Two of Ferrante's novels have been turned into films by Italian filmmakers. Troubling Love became the 1995 feature film Nasty Love, and The Days of Abandonment became a 2005 film of the same title.
Her nonfiction book Fragments (2003) discussion her experiences as a writer.
Identity
In a January 21, 2013, article in The New Yorker, James Woods wrote that Ferrante has said, "books, once they are written, have no need of their authors." Perhaps that is one reason for her pen-name.
Speculation about Ferrante's identity is rife. In the same New Yorker article, Woods also wrote:
In the past twenty years or so, though, she has provided written answers to journalists’ questions, and a number of her letters have been collected and published. From them, we learn that she grew up in Naples, and has lived for periods outside Italy. She has a classics degree; she has referred to being a mother. One could also infer from her fiction and from her interviews that she is not now married. (“Over the years, I’ve moved often, in general unwillingly, out of necessity. . . . I’m no longer dependent on the movements of others, only on my own” is her encryption.) In addition to writing, “I study, I translate, I teach. (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/11/2015.)
Book Reviews
Nothing you read about Elena Ferrante's work prepares you for the ferocity of it. And with each new novel in her revelatory Neapolitan series, she unprepares you all over again…Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is the story of a furious friendship, and the internal violence suffered by two women set against the turbulent landscape of a fractured Italy…this is a woman's story told with such truthfulness that it is not so much a life observed as it is felt. The reader is ransacked and steps back into the world gingerly, with lingering questions about estrangement and belonging.
Amy Rowland - New York Times
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…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.
Roxanna Robinson - New York Times Book Reviewbb
[Those Who Leave] is a book of evidence, the effects of the past told, never shown, and yet it remains compelling, visceral and immediate. The past's touchstones and many characters who have appeared in the previous volumes are alluded to often, but the book stands alone, gallantly becoming for the reader what it is for Elena Greco—an exercise in remembering.... [The novel] is as expansive and broad as it is intimate.... Those Who Stay is a tour de force. I don't want to read anything else.
Jennifer Gilmore - Los Angeles Times
(Starred review.) Surpassing the rapturous storytelling of the previous titles in the Neapolitan Novels, Ferrante here reunites Elena and Lil..., 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.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Rising far above the melodrama of a typical coming-of-age story... [with] keen intellectual curiosity and heartfelt passion.... [T]his tour de force shows off Ferrante's strong storytelling ability and will leave readers eager for the final volume of the series. —Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH
Library Journal
(Starred review.) [The author] approaches her characters' divergent paths with an unblinking objectivity that prevents the saga from sinking into melodrama.... Ferrante's lucid rendering...illustrates both that the personal is political and that novels of ideas can compel as much as their lighter-weight counterparts.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. In this installment of the series, is there a shift in Elena’s relationship with her mother? Or is their dynamic essentially unchanged by time?
2. Has Elena treated her family in Naples unfairly as they claim? How much guilt must she carry for the increasing distance between her and her family?
3. What events lead Elena to understand that violence and ugliness do not end at the border of the old neighborhood? How does this revelation affect her?
4. How does the worldview Elena formed growing up in the neighborhood influence her adult life in more cosmopolitan Florence?
5. How does Ferrante explore the relationship between mind a body over the course of the novel?
6. Michele Solara, the son of the feared loan shark Manuela Solara and Lila’s one-time suitor, says that “money invents scenarios, situations, peoples lives.” Does Ferrante seem to believe this? How much of Elena and Lila’s actions and character are determined by money? Does Elena’s relationship to money and power differ from Lila’s?
7. Is Elena’s violent reaction to her younger sister Elisa’s relationship with Marcello Solara justified? How does this development affect Elena’s relationship with their family?
8. How do Lila and Elena approach motherhood differently?
9. Ferrante delineates a stark difference between the burden of motherhood and the passivity of fatherhood. Is this dynamic specific to the time and place of the novel, or is it universal?
10. Elena grapples with new feminist writing, debates women’s issues with her cultured circle of female friends in Florence, and makes an effort to reconcile the idea of women instilled in her by the neighborhood with the new feminist model. What unspoken, contemporaneous shifts for men and masculinity affect the male characters in the book?
11. Lila says to Elena, “Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.” How reliable is Elena as a narrator?
12. Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels have been described as “one of modern fiction’s richest portraits of friendship” (John Powers, NPR’s Fresh Air). Do you agree that Ferrante captures the nature of friendship between women? Do your friendships resemble Elena and Lila’s relationship in any way?
13. Do Lila’s high standards for Elena do more to inspire or to paralyze her friend?
14. Nino says that Elena attributes character traits and achievements to Lila that actually belong to her. Do you think this is true? If so, which traits?
15. Lila asserts that nothing ever happens unexpectedly. Does anything truly unexpected happen in this novel, or can all the events be traced back to their origins in the first book?
16. What are your predictions for the final installment? Will Nino and Elena really start a new life together? How will that relationship affect the bond between Lila and Elena?
(Questions are issued by the publisher.)