Meghan O'Rourke (2014-10-31). "Elena Ferrante: the global literary sensation nobody knows". The Guardian . Retrieved 2015-07-20. Nino Sarratore (their eldest son, two years older than Lila and Elena, as an adult is a professor and politically active) Near the beginning of Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the third installment in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, our narrator, Elena Greco, encounters her own novel in a bookshop: “ I was there, exposed, and seeing myself caused a violent pounding in my chest. I felt that not only in my book but in novels in general there was something that truly agitated me, a bare and throbbing heart.”

Raffaella Cerullo (known as Lila or Lina), Lila's best friend. She starts a relationship with Enzo, and starts working at IBM.Lenù tells Lila she plans to leave her husband to be with Nino, which horrifies her friend. Nino tells her he can't leave his wife, and Lenù decides to leave Pietro with or without him. The book ends when they board a plane together. After ‘The Story of a New Name’ I needed a break, but I don’t give up easily, so after reading few other books I started on the third installment of the Neapolitan Novels. It was awesome, I devoured the book over a day and a half, I couldn’t stop reading it, I was annoyed when someone talked to me, I just wanted to be left alone and immerse myself. Declining population – increasing populism? The impact of emigration on voting behaviour in Germany People may prefer different sections of David Copperfield over other parts of the book, the bits with Francis Micawber are the best parts by the way, but you can’t really judge the book as anything other than one work. You don’t have four opinions, one per quarter; you have one opinion. 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.

The Story of a New Name takes place immediately after Lila’s marriage to the neighborhood grocer, the young man in charge of one of only two of the neighborhood’s prosperous families. Getting bogged down in the details of the plot of each book is kind of missing the point, so I will try to avoid doing it, but I mention the marriage because this is the single moment that changes the two women’s lives. It is the first and most concrete piece of evidence that the lives they are “meant” to have, as women, are not for them. Lila begins chafing at her vows and new identity (her new name) before the ceremony is even over, and the rest of this installment is, for her, about how she struggles to carve out necessary freedoms for herself, both inside and outside of her marriage. Meanwhile, Elena has left the neighborhood to attend secondary school and university. Academically, there is no denying her talent, but she has what we would, now, instantly identify as impostor syndrome, in spades, and she is nearly undone on multiple occasions by a crippling sense of inauthenticity. When she speaks among her educated friends, she always feels like she is pretending at intelligence, only hiding her poor vulgarity; when she as at home in Naples she simultaneously desires to impress with her accomplishments and be accepted as one of them, unchanged. It’s the story of moving within of two communities, but not truly being a part of either. The question was posed by reader Paolo Di Stefano to Elena Ferrante in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, "how autobiographical is the story of Elena [Greco]?". Ferrante replied, in "her characteristically direct yet elusive manner, 'If by autobiography you mean drawing on one's own experience to feed an invented story, almost entirely. If instead you're asking whether I'm telling my own personal story, not at all'." [15] Melina Cappuccio (the mad woman, in love with Donato Sarratore, cleans the neighborhood's buildings' staircases) My Brilliant Friend". International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Archived from the original on 2015-07-22.Perhaps you all know how this ends. Perhaps it is hardly surprising for me to tell you that we are scattered now, that many of us no longer talk at all. I never told them this, but I didn’t want to live in California anyway.

Pietro Airota, Lenù's husband, and father to Dede and Elsa. A young professor at the university, he believes his career and intellect are superior to his wife's, which she comes to resent. At the end of the novel, she leaves him for Nino Sarratore. 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. Markets and movements. Freedom of movement in the common market and effects on sending countries: win-win or dependency?In a recent interview, Ferrante explained that, for her, “the passion to write never coincided with the desire to become a writer .” In Italy, where the cult of celebrity can be especially toxic, her anonymity is not a denial of the presence of herself in her works (“what lies silent in the dep­ths of me”) but, rather, of “the media emphasis, the predo­minance of the icon of the author over his work.” She repeats again and again in Fragments that although she brings her novels to life, they must then be allowed to stand alone, separate from her.