The Millions

A Year in Reading: Charles Finch

December 22, 2014

I read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan trilogy this year. I read it twice, actually. It made me want to quit writing.

That sounds like the kind of cutesy thing you could say about any book you love, but in fact the reality of it was terrible, a sensation that lasted for days, a blend of nausea, fog, and loss. How can I explain it? Reading those books — My Brilliant Friend, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of a New Name — it was as if I had spent my whole life training to be a world-class swimmer, waking up at dawn to do laps, eating the right stuff — and then, all of the sudden, swimming in the ocean one day, I had been joined briefly by a dolphin and realized, oh, of course, that’s what swimming actually is.

That is: There’s a difference between naturalism and naturalness. Naturalism is still a mode. Ferrante’s early books are great, but they’re modal, full of the effects a novelist can use, beautifully deployed, but effects. By the Neapolitan trilogy, those effects are gone. As a consequence it has less immediate line-to-line dazzle than what we’re used to calling great fiction these days, The Flamethrowers, for example, or even The Days of Abandonment, but what she buys with the sacrifice is a consuming naturalness. There’s not a single moment of falseness across all the thousand pages of the books. In general, even the best novelists enter their texts; the great ones do it almost imperceptibly, but still, behind Walter’s love of birds in Freedom, for instance, you just sense Jonathan Franzen’s love of birds, a weak but noticeable magnetic draw from character to author. Whereas Ferrante works so closely to her characters’ motivations, more closely than any novelist I’ve ever read, that it means the books are not so much realistic as that they are a reality. The result is intoxicating, art with all the beauties of a made thing and the authenticity of a discovered one. It’s like a garment without seams that fits perfectly, or like those Vija Celmins rocks. It’s like the opposite of the Pompidou Center.

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Elena Ferrante’s anger apparent in tale of women’s struggles

November 9, 2014

Owen Richardson

THOSE WHO LEAVE AND THOSE WHO STAY Elena Ferrante Text $29.99

This is the third volume of Elena Ferrante’s Naples quartet to appear in English, and while I may be projecting my enthusiasm here, I would be surprised if anyone who has read the first two needed any prompting to seek it out. And if you haven’t read Ferrante yet this is a good opportunity to start from the beginning.

It’s a challenging beguilement, this story of the fraught, competitive friendship between the narrator, Elena, and the brilliant Lila, the angry, wayward one, both in flight from lower-class 1950s Naples. There is nothing soft or easy about these books, they are almost rebarbative in their refusal to be nice; they are also captivating in their high intelligence, their evocation of the still-powerful past, and their propulsive narrative drive.

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The Allure, And Mystery, Of Elena Ferrante — Whoever She Is

Maureen Dezell

Until recently, few readers or critics on this side of the Atlantic paid much attention to “Elena Ferrante,” the presumed pseudonym of a successful Italian novelist who has kept her identity secret for nearly 30 years. Those who did marveled at what the New Yorker’s James Wood called “remarkable, lucid, astonishingly honest novels,” and “intensely, violently personal prose.” Wood’s January 2013 New Yorker essay on Ferrante’s fiction piqued interest in “My Brilliant Friend,” the first of the author’s Neapolitan novels published in the U.S. Soon after, book groups began adopting the title, and word of mouth spurred sales of the novel and its successor, “The Story of a New Name.” “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay,” the third book in Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, was released stateside in early September to rapturous reviews. The books are now “something of a cult sensation,” wrote Karen Valby in Entertainment Weekly, one of the few outlets that has been able to snag an email interview with the publicity-averse author. Publications from Harper’s Magazine and Vogue have run full-length features, while the daily and Sunday editions of the New York Times have offered significant praise. A recent Times Style Magazine cover headline asked: “Who is Elena Ferrante?” (They offered no answers, only applause.)

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Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

ELENA FERRANTE.

TRANSLATOR ANN GOLDSTEIN

Text, $29.99

Even when brilliant, novels seldom reveal themselves as both revelatory and revolutionary. Elena Ferrante’s mesmeric Neapolitan series promises to become such a literary touchstone, and hers a deserving addition to the list of canonical names.

This apparently straightforward chronicle of lifelong friendship is also a contemporary Comedie Humaine set in Naples, more condensed and controlled than Balzac’s and applicable to any patriarchal society governed by fear and poverty.

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How the Paris Review Snagged the FirstEver In-Person Interview With Elena Ferrante

By Katy Waldman

Indeed, The Paris Review has revealed that its Spring 2015 issue will contain the first ever in-person interview with Elena Ferrante, the mysterious genius behind the Neapolitan Novels and Tesseract-like object of obsession for much of the literary world. Ferrante swept onto the American scene in a dark and glittering chariot of inscrutability when her first book, My Brilliant Friend, hit stores in 2012, followed closely by The Story of a New Name (2013) and Those Who Leave And Those Who Stay (2014). As the novels—about the troubled relationship between two women, Lila and Elena—enthralled readers, guesswork around Ferrante’s identity proliferated, with reviewers speculating that “she” might be a mother, a man, or a sentient cabal of fire-ants. (For her part, Ferrante claimed in an early letter to her publisher that “books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.”) A fragment of the forthcoming exchange (And, again, visit TPR’s blog for a heftier chunk):

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Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

Fiction  Elena Ferrante  Europa Editions  September 2014  ISBN-13: 978-1-60945-233-9  Paperback  418pp  $18.00

Review by Olive Mullet

The reader will either become addicted to or lack the commitment needed for Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels starting with My Brilliant Friend (331 pages), followed by The Story of a New Name (471 pages) and this latest third volume Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. The final fourth volume will come out September 2015. The length of the novels and the character-driven, rather than plot-driven, story might discourage some readers. But the detailed world of a working class Naples neighborhood beginning in the 50s, its families competing for survival, with the ferocious lifelong friendship of two girls Elena and Lila at its center are unique and brutally honest. Length is necessary, as it was in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, for characters to evolve as they do in real life.

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10 Books Everyone Is Talking About This Fall

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

By Elena Ferrante

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is the third volume in Elena Ferrante’s deliciously addictive Neapolitan series. In an expansive yet intimate feat of storytelling, the three novels narrate the intriguing tale of a pair of women whose lifelong relationship is their touchstone and their burden. We meet Lila and Elena in the first book, My Brilliant Friend, as young girls living in a treacherous working-class neighborhood in Naples in the 1950s. Lila is dazzling—a stunning beauty, self-confident, volatile, at once seductive and dangerous. She shines at school, and the conviction in her small hands when she hurls rocks at bullying boys is unmatched. Elena, who lacks Lila’s fearlessness, crouches in her friend’s shadow. Both girls come from a long line of women held down by poverty and violent men and dream of escaping that fate.

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Monday November 10

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Epic Continues

By Abigail Pollak

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here: Dante’s famous admonition at the portals to the Inferno might serve as an epitaph for Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, all three of which take place in postwar Naples, in a poor and violent working-class quarter where “people died of carelessness, of corruption, of abuse.” Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is the latest volume in her projected series, each of which begins with a mystery and a revelation.

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The best books of 2014

December 06, 2014

Welcome to the Globe’s annual list representing a whole year’s worth of reading and reviewing. Browse our critics’ top picks for children, teens, and adults, for fans of fiction and nonfiction, lovers of sports and thrillers, devotees of poetry and all things New England. You may even spot a holiday gift idea or two.

Fiction THOSE WHO LEAVE AND THOSE STAY Elena Ferrante Europa 400 pp., paperback $18 John Freeman

Book Review: ‘Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay’

By Nick Romeo

Near the end of Elena Ferrante’s new novel, “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay,” the narrator, also named Elena, prepares to meet a childhood friend she hasn’t seen in many years. She bathes and dresses her children and then readies herself, trying on every dress she owns. But nothing looks right. “I resigned myself to being what I was,” she writes.

The necessity and impossibility of such a resignation is a major theme in all of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, a series in which her latest is the third of four projected books. The first two novels describe Elena Greco’s childhood in an impoverished neighborhood in mid-20th century Naples. A precocious student, she uses her academic aptitude to escape the harsh and violent world of her youth. But the shadows and personalities of the old neighborhood keep reappearing, refusing to relinquish their grasp on her.

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Issue: September 15, 2014

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. Ferrante, Elena (Author)

Sep 2014. 416 p. Europa, paperback, $18. (9781609452339).

The third novel in Ferrante’s Neapolitan series continues the engaging story of Elena and Lila, picking up where The Story of a New Name (2013) left off. While Lila is working to support her son following the failure of her marriage, Elena is enjoying the success of her best-selling novel. Though they have been disconnected for some time, when Lila collapses from exhaustion, Elena heeds her cry for help. Drawing strength from each other, they take on the terrible working conditions in the factory where Lila works. But their friendship continues to ebb and flow through marriages, affairs, children, and careers. Each has sought in her own way to escape the limitations of her upbringing, but while Lila does so from the confines of their rough Naples neighborhood, Elena’s college degree and marriage into an affluent family open doors that take her farther away. Ferrante continues to imbue this growing saga with great magic, treating the girls’ years of marriage and motherhood with breathtaking honesty while envisaging the turbulence of political and social unrest in 1970s Italy. Though originally planned as a trilogy, the story doesn’t finish here, as this book ends with a hook that will leave readers eagerly awaiting the next installment. — Cortney Ophoff

The Woman in the Mirror: The Novels of Elena Ferrante

Reviewed by John Freeman September 22, 2014

In the past decade, no fiction writer has made it more necessary to think about the performative aspect of being a woman than Elena Ferrante. Her novels, written originally in Italian and translated beautifully by Ann Goldstein, are ferociously engaged with the ways in which a woman – as a daughter, a teenager, a lover, and, most dramatically, a mother – is a kind of person in drag, speaking through a costume that slowly becomes all that one knows of her. (Appropriately, “Elena Ferrante” is a pseudonym — the author has carefully guarded her real identity from readers and critics alike.)

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