Whoever is faltering in the given moment chases the other down to beg for her support, yet every conversation is inevitably tense, full of bluffing, accusations, and denials, because the balance of power could shift at any moment—a new reversal is often lurking just around the following corner of the sentence. He has good news for her: He’s been awarded a tenured professorship at the university in Florence, and thanks to the income he and Elena can be married sooner than anticipated. They preferred not to know, they preferred to pretend that what happened at the hands of the boss miraculously didn’t happen to the women important to them and that—this was the idea they had grown up with—they had to protect her even at the risk of being killed. 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.

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay - SuperSummary Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay - SuperSummary

Criticism about these novels felt inadequate to the largeness of our feeling and thinking about these novels. We plan to organise also a panel with civil society activists and practitioners looking at this issue from a policy perspective. 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).

So why are we so unwilling to consider ourselves to be anything like the women who are Lila and Lenù’s real world reading counterparts? My Brilliant Friend effortlessly balances impossible questions about love, family, shame and duty, and it does so with impeccable style. It’s only now, thinking through our motivating questions about pettiness, that we’ve realized how our critical modes shadowed the content of the novels: they are somewhat bad-acting, ignoble refusals. The field of international migration is predominantly focused on the topic of immigration, debating its causes, the legal challenges it poses, and the way it has been politicised in receiving countries, among other topics of scholarly and political importance. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege.

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay | Elena Ferrante

She discovers she is still attracted to him despite the fact that he abandoned her friend after their love affair. The novels’ frank interest in its characters as dishonorable bad actors set within an even more dishonorable and bad-acting social world, its attention to the pettiness and petty details this scenario generates, is what makes us love them. 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.

By thinking in this essay through the good and bad feelings the novels contain, describe, and generate, we hope to come to a clearer understanding of our own sense of the possibilities and limits of criticism, as it applies to these novels, and to our lives as critics, in this fraught present time more generally. One woman is always leaving the other behind, or, rather, “fleeing” her, as the original “fugge” of the Italian title puts it. My Brilliant Friend, a two-part, five-and-a-half-hour stage adaptation of the Neapolitan Novels, opened at the Rose Theatre, Kingston in March 2017. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang.