The Story of a New Name: My Brilliant Friend Book 2: Youth: 02 (Neapolitan Quartet, 2)

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The Review of the Great Books The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, The Story of the Lost Child (The Neapolitan Novels #2-4) by Elena Ferrante

Antonio is drafted into the army, and Elena tries to get him exempted by going to Michele Solara and asking for him to use his connections. This move makes Antonio mad and he ends the relationship with her. After seeing Elena a handful of times with Nino Sarratore, he is already jealous and sure that Elena is cheating on him. While Elena wouldn’t mind having a relationship with Nino, she sees him one day after school with a very beautiful and classy girl. Nino sees Elena a few times, and is always kind; once he actually kisses her on the cheek, but the next minute he is kissing his girlfriend. Elena is confused and depressed and feels she will never match the class of the girl he is kissing. This gorgeous, obviously symbolic series of shots is exemplary of “My Brilliant Friend,” HBO’s Italian adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels about Elena, Lila, the fierce and complex friendship between them extending from the 1950s through the present, and the tiny Naples town they more and more reluctantly call home. Ferrante’s writing is dense with detail, straightforward and yet prone to underlining metaphorical allusions. The television series, on which the deliberately mysterious Ferrante (a pseudonym) has a writing credit on all episodes, does the same, using narration from an older Elena to guide the stories and blur the lines between memories and facts as the character tries to reconcile such boundaries for herself. Last year, I finally joined the Elena Ferrante fan club. I thought ‘My Brilliant Friend’ completely lived up to its name, and I knew its sequel would have to be included in my 2016 reading. Then, as tends to happen, I started to doubt myself. Would I enjoy ‘The Story of a New Name’ as much as its predecessor? Would my reading pleasure be diminished by the fact that, as the months moved on, I was forgetting the numerous character names that took me so long to get to grips with in the first volume? At that point, almost against his will, the tone of Stefano's voice rose: "Now you're really pissing me off, Lina."When you have played the game a few times, you may want to try combining the bad girl and good girl roles. You may for example be a bad girl who gets married and tries to stay faithful to her husband, or a good girl who writes a daring and truthful novel about her life. Note however that none of these strategies will actually let you win.

Need an original book title, and fast? We got you. Here are 8 ways to come up with book title ideas. 1. Start free writing to find keywordsProfessor Airota and his daughter, had, for example, affectionate skirmishes on political subjects that I had heard about from Pasquale, from Nino, but whose substance I knew almost nothing about. Arguments like: you’ve been trapped by inter-class collaboration, you call it a trap, I call it mediation; mediation in which the Christian Democrats always and only win; you’re not reforming a thing; in our place what would you do; revolution, revolution and revolution; revolution is taking Italy out of the middle ages….

The Story of a New Name” is the second part of a trilogy that began with “My Brilliant Friend.” Both novels are primarily set in Naples, are Naples, as they teem with the city’s dialect, violence and worldview. Tracing the friendship between Lila Cerullo and Elena Greco, two extraordinary and troubled girls who become extraordinary and troubled women, Elena’s first-person account charts what scholars and politicians alike have ominously labeled the Southern Question: the cultural and economic divide between north and south that has defined Italian life for centuries. But history never overpowers what is at heart a local story about the families living along a poor Neapolitan stradone, or avenue, with intricate plotlines spun like fine thread around Elena and Lila. The Neapolitan novels move far from contrivance, logic or respectability to ask uncomfortable questions about how we live, how we love, how we singe an existence in a deeply flawed world that expects pretty acquiescence from its women. In all their beauty, their ugliness, their devotion and deceit, these girls enchant and repulse, like life, like our very selves.” Loved it just as much the 2nd time reading it. I adore these characters and would read 100 books about them.

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In the spring of 1966, Lila, in a state of great agitation, entrusted to me a metal box that contained eight notebooks. She said that she could no longer keep them at home, she was afraid her husband might read them. I carried off the box without comment, apart from some ironic allusions to the excessive amount of string she had tied around it. At that time our relationship was terrible, but it seemed that only I considered it that way. The rare times we saw each other, she showed no embarrassment, only affection; a hostile word never slipped out. Elena Ferrante is the author of several remarkable, lucid, austerely honest novels . . . My Brilliant Friend is a large, captivating, amiably peopled bildungsroman.”

The Neapolitan Novels" tell the story of Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo, who meet at age 8 in early 1950s Naples. They bond over their love of books and their yearning for a life larger than what's offered by their poor, working-class neighborhood that cruelly grinds down everyone, especially women. Where Elena is a bright, accommodating girl eager for approval — she's a classic A-student — her brilliant friend Lila is more gifted, sexier and utterly implacable — she does what she wants. In a decision that alters their lives, Elena's parents pay to let her continue beyond grade school, but Lila's father refuses.I was so glad that no one in that nice little family had asked me, as happened frequently, where I came from, what my father did and my mother, I was I, I, I.” Imagine if Jane Austen got angry and you’ll have some idea of how explosive these works are.”— The Australian This novel broke my heart. It broke my heart so badly that I had to stop reading it for a few days to recover. During her last year in Pisa, Elena meets a new young man. He is the son of a famous professor. She graduates with honors but is not granted a job as a professor. Her boyfriend proposes to her. In a fit of reminiscence Elena writes down the story of her youth in third-person, novel form, and gives it to her fiancé, Pietro. Pietro gives it to his mother, who sends it to a publisher in Milan- Elena’s novel is going to be published. In the past there had been Lila, a continuous happy detour into surprising lands. Now everything I was I wanted to get from myself. I was almost nineteen, I would never again depend on someone, and I would never again miss someone.”