The Center of the World
Jacqueline Sheehan, 2015
Kensington Books
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781617738968
Summary
In this evocative and emotionally compelling novel, a mother and her adopted daughter each embark on a journey of self-discovery in the wake of a stunning revelation.
How do you keep a secret so huge that it could devastate everyone you care about?
For Kate Malloy, the answer is simple: one lie at a time. That’s how she has protected her daughter for more than a dozen years, shielding her from a terrible truth. Sofia, a fifteen-year-old soccer star living in New England, believes she was born in Mexico and legally adopted by Kate.
But a posthumous letter from her stepfather tells Sofia a different story—one of civil unrest and bloodshed, death-defying heroism and child-smuggling, harrowing sacrifice and desperate decisions.
Sofia’s trust in her mother is shattered. At last Kate must do what she knows is right—accompany Sofia back to Guatemala, the place where Kate found horror and heartache but also the greatest joy of her life.
As mother and daughter confront the damage done by years of dangerous yet necessary deceptions, they discover how much love, hope, and happiness may still remain—if they have the courage to face their past. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Jacqueline Sheehan, Ph.D., is a fiction writer and essayist. She is a New Englander through and through, but spent twenty years living in the western states of Oregon, California, and New Mexico doing a variety of things, including house painting, freelance photography, newspaper writing, clerking in a health food store, and directing a traveling troupe of high school puppeteers.
Currently on the faculty of Writers in Progress and Grub Street in Massachusetts, she also offers international workshops on the combination of yoga and writing. She writes travel articles about lesser-known destinations and lives in Massachusetts.
Novels
Sheehan's books include Truth (2003), reissued as The Comet's Tale: A Novel About Sojurner Truth (2011); Now & Then (2009); two Peaks Island novels, Lost & Found (2007) and Picture This (2012); and, most recently, The Center of the World (2015). (Adapted from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[A]n emotionally charged tale that explores the mother-daughter bond, set against the backdrop of the Guatemalan Civil War and complete with beautiful prose despite the atrocities.... Sheehan...expertly carries her narrative through war and peace, fear and security, and love and redemption.
Publishers Weekly
[A] breathtaking tale.... Sheehan's enthralling novel, through tales of grief and happiness, offers readers a strong sense of catharsis. The author smoothly captures the intricacies of cultural exchange with grace and intersection.... [A] captivating read. —Marian Mays, Butte-Silver Bow P.L., MT
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. After the massacre takes place, Kate Malloy reacts instantly to protect Sofia. What might have been an influence from her past that made her react so dramatically? The death of Kate’s mother is driving her decisions in other areas of her life. How does it resonate with Sophia?
2. Kate is a scientist and a graduate student who has little experience with children. Discuss her evolution of responding to Sofia as a mother while they are in Antigua.
3. There are complicated issues surrounding Kate’s decision to take Sofia out of Guatemala? Did she make the right choice? Was it right to pull the child out of her Mayan community? Was there any other choice that she could have made?
4. Times of war, disaster, and the constant state of heightened senses can throw people together in the illusion of love. Is this what happened to Kate and Will? Or did they fall in love so deeply, regardless of time? What other parallels pull the two of them together?
5. Discuss how Will’s initial excitement about his job opportunity as a Language Specialist blinds him to the military forces at work in Guatemala?
6. What is Jenkins final revenge with Will? Discuss how a lifetime of war can create cruelty, as with Jenkins, or kindness and bravery, as in the case of Fernando.
7. Kate makes a choice to protect Sophia and Will. What price does she pay for lying about Sofia’s heritage and the circumstances of her adoption? How does it affect Sophia, Sam, and Kate?
8. How is it possible for Kate to remain in love with Will, and yet find another man to love and marry?
9. Kate is haunted by dreams about and visitations from Manuela, Sophia’s mother. Sophia has a deep inner knowledge that she a twin brother. How does the Mayan belief of ancestors relate to this story? Who are the ancestors who influence this story? Does your understanding of Martin’s motivations change over the course of the book?
10. Sam, Kate’s father, is a steady anchor for her, but he has also been scarred by war. How does he change from the experience of traveling to Guatemala?
11. Sophia is a soccer star at her Massachusetts high school. How do the threads of soccer bind Sophia to her homeland?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Moor's Account
Laila Lalami, 2014
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780804170628
Summary
In these pages, Laila Lalami brings us the imagined memoirs of the first black explorer of America: Mustafa al-Zamori, called Estebanico.
The slave of a Spanish conquistador, Estebanico sails for the Americas with his master, Dorantes, as part of a danger-laden expedition to Florida. Within a year, Estebanico is one of only four crew members to survive.
As he journeys across America with his Spanish companions, the Old World roles of slave and master fall away, and Estebanico remakes himself as an equal, a healer, and a remarkable storyteller. His tale illuminates the ways in which our narratives can transmigrate into history—and how storytelling can offer a chance at redemption and survival. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1968
• Where—Rabat, Morocco
• Education—B.A., Universite Mohammed V; M.A., University College of London; Ph.D.,
University of Southern California
• Awards—American Book Award
• Currently—teaches at the University of California, Riverside
Laila Lalami is a Moroccan American novelist and essayist. She was born and raised in Rabat, Morocco, where she earned her B.A. in English from Universite Mohammed V. In 1990, she received a British Council fellowship to study in England, earning her M.A. in Linguistics at University College London.
Lalami moved to the U.S. in 1992, and completed a Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of Southern California. She is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.
Writing
Lalami began writing fiction and nonfiction in English in 1996. Her literary criticism, cultural commentary, and opinion pieces have appeared in the Boston Globe, Boston Review, Los Angeles Times, Nation, New York Times, Washington Post, Daily Beast, and elsewhere.
Her debut collection of stories, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, was released in the fall of 2005 and has since been translated into six languages. Her first novel, Secret Son (2009), was longlisted for the Orange Prize.
Her second novel The Moor's Account (2014) is based on Estevanico, the historic first black explorer of America and one of four survivors of the 1527 Narvaez expedition. The book won an American Book Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and nominated for the Man Booker Prize.
Lalami has received an Oregon Literary Arts grant and a Fulbright Fellowship. She was selected in 2009 by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/20/2015.)
Book Reviews
Feels at once historical and contemporary.... For Lalami, storytelling is a primal struggle over power between the strong and the weak, between good and evil, and against forgetting.... Lalami sees the story [of Estebanico] as a form of moral and spiritual instruction that can lead to transcendence.
New York Times Book Review
Estebanico is a superb storyteller, capable of sensitive character appraisals and penetrating ethnographic detail.
Wall Street Journal
[A] rich novel based on an actual, ill-fated 16th century Spanish expedition to Florida.... Offers a pungent alternative history that muses on the ambiguous power of words to either tell the truth or reshape it according to our desires.
Los Angeles Times
Compelling.... Necessary.... Laila Lalami’s mesmerizing The Moor’s Account presents us a historical fiction that feels something like a plural totality....a narrative that braids points of view so intricately that they become one even as we’re constantly reminded of the separate and often contrary strands that render the whole.
Los Angeles Review of Books
A bold and exhilarating bid to give a real-life figure muzzled by history the chance to have his say in fiction.
San Francisco Chronicle
Meticulously researched and inventive.... Those interested in the history of the Spanish colonization of the Americas will find much to like in The Moor’s Account, as will lovers of good yarns of faraway lands and times.
Seattle Times
Excellent historical fiction.... The way the Moor’s account differs from the Spaniards is amazing. It’s a play on perspective in more ways than one.
Ebony
An exciting tale of wild hopes, divided loyalties, and highly precarious fortunes.
New Yorker
Stunning.... The Moor’s Account sheds light on all of the possible the New World exploration stories that didn’t make history.
Huffington Post
Lalami's second novel is historical fiction of the first-order, a gripping tale of Spanish exploration in the New World set in the years 1527 to 1536, as told by a Muslim slave. Meticulously researched.... [t]his is a colorful but grim tale of Spanish exploration and conquest, marked by brutality, violence, and indifference to the suffering of native peoples.
Publishers Weekly
Assured, lyrical imagining of the life of one of the first African slaves in the New World—a native, like Lalami, of Morocco and, like her, a gifted storyteller.... Adding a new spin to a familiar story, Lalami offers an utterly believable, entertainingly told alternative to the historical record. A delight.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The Moor's Account:
1. What role does money—and the pursuit of money—play in this book? Early on, Estebanico's father warns him that "trade would open the door to greed and greed was an inconsiderate guest; it would bring its evil relations with it." What are the ways in which that prediction plays out in the novel?
2. Why does Estebanico sell himself into slavery?
3. Once a slave, Estebanico is taken to Spain where he is stripped of his name, Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdussalam al-Zamori. What is the significance of that act—symbolically in the novel, as well as psychologically/spiritually in real life? What does it mean to deprive someone of his/her name? How does losing his name affect Estebanico?
4. Laila Lalami is concerned about the role that Arabs, Africans, and Muslims played in founding the New World. Why were people of color—non-Europeans—left out of historical accounts of New World discovery? How does the author develop her ideas of omission, particularly near the end of the novel when Estebanico finds the wooden charm in the shape of a hand?
5. In what way does Estebanico's account of the expedition differ from the official version by Cabeza de Vaca? What was omitted from the "official" version—and why?
6. Follow up to Question 5: Estebanico equates written records with power. What might he mean?
7. This story is very much about atonement. How does Estebanico remake himself? What events led to his desire to redeem himself? Talk about the way that Lalami portrays the Castilians as opposed to Moors and Native Americans? Why are Europeans seemingly beyond redemption in this story?
8. Why does Estebanico decide to write his own account of the expedition? Consider his thinking that "Maybe if our experiences, in all of their glorious, magnificent colors, were somehow added up, they would lead us to the blinding light of the truth." Keeping that passage in mind, talk about storytelling as a spiritual endeavor.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Story of the Lost Child (Neapolitan Novels 4)
Elena Ferrante, 2015
Europa Editions
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781609452865
Summary
“Nothing quite like this has ever been published before,” proclaimed The Guardian newspaper about the Neapolitan Novels in 2014. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the third book in the series, was an international best seller and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Its author was dubbed “one of the great novelists of our time” by the New York Times Book Review.
This fourth and final installment in the series raises the bar even higher and indeed confirms Elena Ferrante as one of the world’s best living storytellers.
Here is the dazzling saga of two women, the brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery uncontainable Lila. In this book, both are adults; life’s great discoveries have been made, its vagaries and losses have been suffered.
Through it all, the women’s friendship, examined in its every detail over the course of four books, remains the gravitational center of their lives. Both women once fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up—a prison of conformity, violence, and inviolable taboos. Elena married, moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books.
But now, Elena has returned to Naples to be with the man she has always loved. Lila, on the other hand, never succeeded in freeing herself from Naples. She has become a successful entrepreneur, but her success draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect her neighborhood.
Yet somehow this proximity to a world she has always rejected only brings her role as unacknowledged leader of that world into relief. For Lila is unstoppable, unmanageable, unforgettable!
Against the backdrop of a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous and a world undergoing epochal change, this story of a lifelong friendship is told with unmatched honesty. Lila and Elena clash, drift apart, reconcile, and clash again, in the process revealing new facets of their friendship.
The four volumes in this series constitute a long remarkable story that readers will return to again and again, and, like Elena and Lila themselves, every return will bring with it new discoveries. (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, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013) is the third, and this book 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
Elena and Lila…are one of those unforgettable pairs who define each other and take their place in our collective imagination as a matched set.... Ms. Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet is utterly distinctive, immersing us not just in a time and place, but deep within the psychological consciousness of its narrator.... Ms. Ferrante's writing—lucid and direct, but with a cyclonic undertow—is very much a mirror of both her heroines.... Ms. Ferrante…captures the day-to-day texture of women's lives…The novels are beautifully enmeshed, one with another, as if Ms. Ferrante had the entire quartet in her head from the start.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Ferrante...adumbrates the mysterious beauty and brutality of personal experience.
Rachel Cusk - New York Times Book Review
[W]ith her new novel, The Story of the Lost Child, Ferrante has written what I’d call a “city book,” a knowing and complex tale that encompasses an entire metropolis. The breadth of vision makes this final installment feel like the essential volume.
John Domini - Washington Post
The saga is both comfortingly traditional and radically fresh, it gives readers not just what they want, but something more than they didn't know they craved...through this fusion of high and low art, Ms. Ferrante emerges as a 21st-century Dickens
Economist (UK)
The Story of the Lost Child does not offer a comfortable end to the series, but it confirms Ferrante—once again–as one of contemporary fiction’s most compelling voices.
Telegraph (UK)
This is Ferrante at the height of her brilliance.
Elissa Schappell - Vanity Fair
(Starred review.) The novel is Elena's final work and permanently ties Elena and Lila together, for better and worse. This stunning conclusion further solidifies the Neapolitan novels as Ferrante's masterpiece and guarantees that this reclusive author will remain far from obscure for years to come
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Word of mouth launched this series, glowing reviews helped, and, eventually, a publishing phenomenon was born. The series’ conclusion is a genuine literary event.
Booklist
(Starred review.) Elena's narrative...confidently carries readers through the course of two lives, but the shadowy circumstances of those lives will invite rereading and reinterpretation.... [A] mythic portrait of a female friendship in the chthonian world of postwar Naples.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
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.)
The Story of a New Name (Neapolitan Novels 2)
Elena Ferrante, 2012 (trans., 2013)
Europa Editions
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781609451349
Summary
The second book following My Brilliant Friend and featuring the two friends Lila and Elena.
The two protagonists are now in their twenties. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila. Meanwhile, Elena continues her journey of self-discovery.
The two young women share a complex and evolving bond that brings them close at times, and drives them apart at others. Each vacillates between hurtful disregard and profound love for the other.
With this complicated and meticulously portrayed friendship at the center of their emotional lives, the two girls mature into women, paying the cruel price that this passage exacts. (From the publisher.)
Books in the series
My Brilliant Friend (2011) is the first of Ferrante's four Neapolitan Novels. This book is the second, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013) 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
Every so often you encounter an author so unusual it takes a while to make sense of her voice. The challenge is greater still when this writer's freshness has nothing to do with fashion, when it's imbued with the most haunting music of all, the echoes of literary history. Elena Ferrante is this rare bird: so deliberate in building up her story that you almost give up on it, so gifted that by the end she has you in tears.... As a translator, Ann Goldstein does Ferrante a great service. Like the original Italian, the English here is disciplined, precise, never calling attention to itself.... Ferrante's gift for recreating real life stems as much from the quiet, unhurried rhythm of her writing as from the people and events she describes. The translation reproduces Ferrante's narrative ebb and flow while registering the distinct features of her voice.
Joseph Luzzi - New York Times Book Review
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. (From a 2013 review of The Story of a New Name.)
Joan Fran - San Francisco Chronicle
Elena Greco and her "brilliant friend" Lina Cerullo...enter the tumultuous world of young womanhood with all its accompanying love, loss, and confusion.... Ferrante masterfully combines Elena's recollections of events with Lila's point of view.... [P]oignant.
Publishers Weekly
[A] beautifully written portrait of a sometimes difficult friendship....[and] a study in the possibility of triumph over disappointment.... [T]his second book closes with [Elana] embarking on what promises to be a brilliant literary career and with the hint that true love may not be far behind. Admirers of Ferrante's work will eagerly await the third volume.
Kirkus Reviews
(The following reviews refer to the entirety of Ferrante's Neapolitan series, not just The Story of a New Name.)
Ferrante’s novels are intensely, violently personal, and because of this they seem to dangle bristling key chains of confession before the unsuspecting reader. (From a 2013 overview of the Neapolitan series.)
James Wood - The New Yorker
When I read [the Neapolitan novels] I find that I never want to stop. I feel vexed by the obstacles—my job, or acquaintances on the subway—that threaten to keep me apart from the books. I mourn separations (a year until the next one—how?). I am propelled by a ravenous will to keep going. (From a 2013 review of the Neapolitan series.)
Molly Fischer - The New Yorker
[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.
John Powers - Fresh Air, NPR
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.
Entertainment Weekly
Discussion Questions
2. Even before Lila and Stefano separate, Nunzia expresses regret that Lila married so young, when in fact, Nunzia, Fernando, and Rino pushed Lila into her marriage. What role does family play in Lila’s and Elena’s lives? In what way can Nunzia’s servitude at Ischia be seen as penance for crippling her daughter’s ambitions?
3. Out of all of the men Lila could have fallen in love with, why does she choose Nino? Are her intentions malicious? Or does her choice reflect a desire for a new kind of life? Is a new kind of life possible for her?
4. One gets the impression that the bond between Lila and Elena is stronger than any marriage. Why is that? Why can they be close to each other in a way they can’t be close to their spouses?
5. In Ferrante’s work, violence and the threat of violence are so omnipresent that they are almost characters in themselves. How does Ferrante show cultural violence reinforcing organizational violence (e.g. the mafia and camorra), and vice versa?
6. As Elena soon realizes, Lila’s “art project” at the shoe store is an act of self-destruction. In what other ways does Lila engage in self-destruction? Is her insistence on wearing fine clothing also a way of effacing herself? Is the same true of her retreat into motherhood? Why does Lila want to be erased?
7. How might Lila’s life have been different if she had not been beautiful and had grown into her beauty the way that Elena did? Would it have been any different?
8. When Elena loses faith that the university will ever give her the social mobility she desires, she explains how not everyone at the university is so despondent about their futures. She says, [Those who are not despondent] were youths—almost all male . . . who excelled because they knew, without apparent effort, the present and the future use of the labor of studying. They knew because of the families they came from . . .” (403). Is Elena right that she will never really be able to rise about the class in which she was born? Why or why not?
9. We learn from Elena that she practically failed her university exam only to discover that she passed with marks high enough to receive a scholarship. In what other ways is Elena an unreliable narrator? Can the reader trust her portrayal of Lila?
10. How might the Neapolitan novels have been different if Lila had authored them rather than Elena? How would she have described her friend?
11. When Elena returns home from school, she has trouble communicating with her mother. She says, “Language itself, in fact, had become a mark of alienation. I expressed myself in a way that was too complex for her, although I made an effort to speak in dialect, and when I realized that and simplified the sentences, the simplification made them unnatural and therefore confusing” (437). What is the role of language in The Story of a New Name? How does language underline the girls’ complex ties to the community in which they were born?
12. In My Brilliant Friend, Elena and Lila adore Little Women. And again, the novel comes up in The Story of a New Name. In what ways do Elena and Lila’s lives differ from or resemble those of the March sisters? What is Ferrante trying to tell us in making this comparison?
13. Elena and Lila began life in the same neighborhood, going to the same school, but by the end of the book, their lives have diverged. Why is this? Is Lila debilitated by her superior intelligence? Is she too combative to be accepted? Or is Elena merely luckier than Lila? What qualities have allowed Elena to succeed?
14. Many have referred to the Neapolitan Novels as poignant portrayals of female friendship, which surely they are. But in what ways do the experiences of Elena and Lila extend beyond the female condition and speak to the human condition, albeit in a voice that just happens to be female?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)