Elena Ferrante

Ann Goldstein

Set in the late 1960s and the 1970s, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay continues the story of the feisty and rebellious Lina and her lifelong friend, the brilliant and bookish Elena. Lina, after separating from her husband, is living with her young son in a new neighbourhood of Naples and working at a local factory. Elena has left Naples, earned a degree from an elite college, and published a novel, all of which has opened the doors to a world of learned and fascinating interlocutors. The era, with its dramatic changes in sexual politics and social costumes, with its seemingly limitless number of new possibilities, is rendered with breathtaking vigour. This third Neapolitan Novel is not only a moving story of friendship but also a searing portrait of a rapidly changing world. Since the publication of My Brilliant Friend, the first of the Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante's fame as one of today's most compelling, insightful, and stylish authors has grown. She has gained admirers among authors, artists, 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.

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

I feel like the knight in an ancient romance as, wrapped in his shining armor, after performing a thousand astonishing feats throughout the world, he meets a ragged, starving herdsman, who, never leaving his pasture, subdues and controls horrible beasts with his bare hands, and with prodigious courage.

aywen

When you exist in a place that does not welcome you, your entire life focus becomes on trying to escape that place. You envision that the freedom and happiness you seek will be waiting for you outside. But the city that birthed you belongs to the world that birthed you, and we are all made of the same clay. Growing up is realising that the sickness of your hometown is actually the sickness of the world.

deniz

I had fled, in fact. Only to discover, in the decades to come, that I had been wrong, that it was a chain with larger and larger links: the neighborhood was connected to the city, the city to Italy, Italy to Europe, Europe to the whole planet. And this is how I see it today: it's not the neighborhood that's sick, it's not Naples, it's the entire earth, it's the universe, or universes. And shrewdness means hiding and hiding from oneself the true state of things.

Ronja Karppinen

People died of carelessness, of corruption, of abuse, and yet, in every round of voting, gave their enthusiastic approval to the politicians who made their life unbearable.

Then he asked me, in his usual good-humored way: why are you so willing to let your erotic pages be called "risqué," why do you yourself describe them that way in public? And he explained to me that I shouldn't: my novel wasn't simply the episode on the beach, there were more interesting and finer passages; and then, if here and there something sounded daring, that was mainly because it had been written by a girl; obscenity, he said, is not alien to good literature, and the true art of the story, even if it goes beyond the bounds of decency, is never risqué.

Maybe, I thought, I've given too much weight to the cultivated use of reason, to good reading, to well controlled language, to political affiliation; maybe, in the face of abandonment, we are all the same; maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved.

With her, there was no way to feel that things were settled; every fixed point of our relationship sooner or later turned out to be provisional; something shifted in her head that unbalanced her and unbalanced me.

Writers above all have such a great role in revolution, because their power is in their voices, their ability to move and influence. They, more than anyone, do not have the privilege to stay silent.

"Don't be timid. You're a writer, use your role, test it, make something of it. These are decisive times, everything is turning upside down. Participate, be present."

How many who had been girls with us were no longer alive, had disappeared from the face of the earth because of illness, because their nervous systems had been unable to endure the sandpaper of torments, because their blood had been spilled.

I had long ago convinced myself that one can train oneself to anything, even to political passion.

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