Neapolitan Quartet" is an immersive look at a female friendship". The Dartmouth . Retrieved 2023-02-27. Roxborough, Scott (September 3, 2018). "HBO's Big Italian Bet With 'My Brilliant Friend' ". The Hollywood Reporter . Retrieved September 7, 2018. This may be the last time I’ll talk about Lila with a wealth of detail. Later on she became more evasive, and the material at my disposal was diminished. It’s the fault of our lives diverging, the fault of distance. And yet even when I lived in other cities and we almost never met, and she as usual didn’t give me any news and I made an effort not to ask for it, her shadow goaded me, depressed me, filled me with pride, deflated me, giving me no rest. Rino Cerullo (Lila's older brother, five to seven years older than Lila, works at the family's shoe shop) It's a sorting that happens before many of us have even decided what we want to major in, before many of us have even had our first sip of beer.

This sentence stages our most polemic claim—“taste is just another name for internalized misogyny”—as a truth claim at the foundation of an argument rather than the argument itself. More, the claim can’t hold, argumentatively: it is out of scale with itself. It contains a multitude of debatable assumptions about how taste, culture, gender, and even psychology work, yet we were uninterested in debating any of them. Because the very fact of having to debate them, carefully, with evidence and expertise, dissipates the deep feelings—of love, of irritation—that the covers cause us to feel and, importantly, what the discussion of the covers lead us to know but to know other than through agreed upon standards of argument. The knowledge, here, came from the accrued feeling of living for years in a world that finds a pastel aesthetic distasteful. Criticism’s carefulness would defuse the power of experience behind this claim. For most of this book the narrator, Elena Greco, is trapped in restless domesticity on the edge of a new life that fails to satisfy. Naples, with its entwined, familiar lives, is faded into a distance made foggy by new responsibilities in Florence. The novel was adapted by HBO and RaiTV in their series My Brilliant Friend. The content of this novels corresponds to the third season of the show, which aired in February 2022. [1] Plot [ edit ]It was only when they looked at the split between Trump supporters that the split began to reveal itself:

Our essay sought to interrupt what seemed to be a consensus opinion that the covers were, obviously, “bad.” But we didn’t want to argue that they were, in fact, “good.” We wanted to poke at what we maintain are the misogynistic value claims about good and bad taste. Critics seemed to agree, no matter where they were writing, that the “cheesy romance novel” quality of the covers was antithetical to good writing, good thinking, or even a good account of anarchic emotional life (and thus that if the covers had any merit, it was ironic, still buying into the same standards of taste). Yet, we argued, this was wrong. We wrote: Cohen, Roger. "The Violent World of Elena Ferrante | Roger Cohen". ISSN 0028-7504 . Retrieved 2023-02-27. Corregan, Maureen (September 10, 2015). " 'Lost Child' Wraps Up Ferrante's Neapolitan Series With 'Perfect Devastation' ". NPR . Retrieved February 27, 2023. The question the novels seek to answer—what happened to Lenù’s friendship with Lila?—is not a critical question; what went wrong is not a matter of reason or clarity. For what would it mean to evaluate a friendship in terms of “the best that is known?” How, in friendship, literature, and politics, do we evaluate what’s good, what’s interesting, what helps and what hurts? What standards guide our judgements, where do the standards come from, and whose power do they support or undercut? There seemed to us, thus, to be a mismatch between the novels’ dissatisfaction with public writing and the act of publicly writing about them. As critics tried—in essays, even in Facebook threads—to fit their encounters with the novels’ pettiness into critical forms, the pettiness lost its vitality, was in fact called out as petty, which was, in our experience, irritating.The Neapolitan Novels, also known as the Neapolitan Quartet, are a four-part series of fiction by the pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante, published originally by Edizioni e/o, translated into English by Ann Goldstein, and published by Europa Editions (New York). The English-language titles of the novels are 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). In the original Italian edition, the whole series bears the title of the first novel L'amica geniale ("My Brilliant Friend"). The series has been characterized as a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story. [1] In an interview in Harper's Magazine, Elena Ferrante has stated that she considers the four books to be "a single novel" published serially for reasons of length and duration. [2] The series has sold over 10 million copies in 40 countries. [3]

In Florence, Lenù runs into Nino again when her husband Pietro brings him home. She discovers she is still attracted to him despite the fact that he abandoned her friend after their love affair. She feels inspired by Nino, who seems to recognize her intellect and blames Pietro for letting her be wasted by a routine with small children. Inspired by this, she writes a feminist text which Adele deems worthy of publication. She and Nino start an affair, which makes Elena realize how unhappy she is in her marriage. I concluded that first of all I had to understand better what I was. Investigate my nature as a woman. I had been excessive, I had striven to give myself male capacities. I thought I had to know everything, be concerned with everything. What did I care about politics, about struggles. I wanted to make a good impression on men, be at their level. At the level of what, of their reason, most unreasonable.” According to The Guardian, this tension goes beyond the relation between Lila and Lenu, encompassing all women in the narrative: "Ferrante's subject – it is almost an obsession – is the way women are shaped, distorted and sometimes destroyed by their social milieu (and by the men around them). Voicing what can still seem unvoiceable, she delves into the darker tensions between daughters and mothers, the tug-and-pull of being a wife or a mother and wanting to retain some sense of independent self." [9] Motherhood and ambivalence [ edit ] Men, dazed by pleasure, absent-mindedly sow their seed. Overcome by their orgasm, they fertilize us. They show up inside us and withdraw, leaving, concealed in our flesh, their ghost, like a lost object.” The main reason to love My Brilliant Friend is that it contains one of the most honest, unsentimental depictions of friendship—female or otherwise—in either literature or television.Storia della bambina perduta, L'amica geniale volume 4 (2014; English translation: The Story of the Lost Child, 2015). OCLC 910239891.