Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

イタリアナポリで生きる女性達の人生をしばし共有。強く共感させる筆致で、読書の幸せを感じてます。

Non e un libro facile a capire, pero ha la capacita di farti riffletere, di cercare delle informazioni, di scopriti a te stesso.

não é um thriller de ação, mas a história toca pelo realismo e profundidade emotiva

Those of you that have followed the fortunes of close friends (and sometimes rivals) Lila and Elena from their childhood - in a rough district of a post-war Naples - will not be disappointed with this impressive third novel. As before, it is told from Elena's point of view with all the honesty, ferocity, emotional fluency and intensity we've come to expect from this extraordinary author. The two women - who are in a psychological sense two halves of the same complex being - are now approaching their thirties. Their fortunes fluctuate. In the first part, while Elena is setting up house in Florence and being feted as a prize-winning novelist, Lila is working in a sausage factory. She is wearing herself out, making herself ill, living with Enzo in a platonic relationship and bringing up her son. She gets caught up in problematic industrial relations at the factory - reflecting wider social concerns - which draws in people from Elena's circle, the Sarratore family, and she is almost broken by the violence of it. Elena arrives from her comfortable, middle-class life in Florence to take care of her and to reconnect. In the latter half of the novel the focus is more on Elena's problematic marriage and progress as a writer. Despite wishing to be a writer first, wife and mother second, with two small two daughters she gets bogged down in domesticity. Her husband puts his academic work first and doesn't fully connect with her; theirs is a more abrasive than a loving marriage, though they have their moments; but Elena becomes stifled by it and she finds writing her second novel difficult. Events for her move to an explosive finale when a figure, a passion, from the past re-enters her life and ignites it. She has to face that most difficult of all dilemmas for a woman - who to put first, one's children or the lover one can't live without? At the heart of this forensic and compelling novel is the complex, multi-layered friendship between the two women. Their differences are increasingly apparent. Lila is rougher, courser but more streetwise, clever and charismatic than Elena, whose intellectual and middleclass aspirations are put to the test. Many of the characters we met in the previous novels - overlapping circles of Neapolitan society - make background or cameo appearances, giving a sense of how the friends and neighbours of the women's childhood expanded into circles of commerce, local power, influence and corruption. Apparently, little is known about the author. One wonders how this is possible in an age where nothing is private any more. It's a brilliant and enthralling novel. (See also the Guardian's Review section for an article on Ferranti, 2 Nov 2014).

Elena Ferrante is probably the best author I have discovered recently. I have read all three of the Neapolitan trilogy and am in the process of ordering the following book. The writing is powerful, the words evoke the 'neighbourhood' so well you feel as if you are living the lives of the two women and the others in Naples, the difference between the classes in 1950's Italy, the political environment of the 60's. My goal is to read everything I can by Elena Ferrante, a very special author!